Indonesia Executes 8, Including 7 Foreigners, Convicted on Drug Charges

Jakarta: Defying international condemnation and rejecting 11th-hour pleas for clemency, the Indonesian government executed eight drug convicts after midnight on Wednesday, including seven foreigners.

But the execution of a ninth convict, scheduled to happen at the same time, was unexpectedly postponed at nearly the last minute, the Indonesia attorney general's office said.

The eight executed prisoners from Australia, Brazil and Nigeria, along with one Indonesian, faced separate police firing squads at about 12:25 a.m. local time. The executions took place at a site outside the gates of Pasir Putih prison on the island of Nusa Kambangan off the southern coast of Java, according to the attorney general's office.

Authorities granted the stay of execution to Mary Jane Veloso, 30, a Philippine citizen, so they could review her conviction for smuggling heroin into Indonesia in 2010.

The woman's family maintains that she was duped into carrying the drugs, hidden in a suitcase, by a drug syndicate. President Benigno Aquino III of the Philippines had repeatedly appealed for her to be spared.

"Eight people were executed but not Mary Jane," Tony Spontana, a spokesman for the attorney general's office, said in a brief telephone text message.

Relatives and friends of the condemned - who consisted of two Australians, one Brazilian and four Nigerians - had paid them final visits earlier Tuesday, but were not allowed by the Indonesian authorities to witness the executions.

Shortly after midnight Tuesday, mourners in the port town of Cilacap, which is the access point to the prison island, held a candlelight vigil for the condemned prisoners that was televised.

The mass execution was the second in Indonesia this year. In January, five foreign drug convicts and one Indonesian convicted of murder were executed on the island.

On Saturday, the attorney general's office gave 72 hours' notice to the condemned, their legal teams and their respective embassies that the executions would be carried out.

On Monday, an Australian prisoner, Andrew Chan, married his Indonesian fiancée in a small wedding ceremony at the prison.

A French citizen who was also originally on the list to be executed won a two-week reprieve from the State Administrative Court in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, which will hear his challenge to a clemency rejection by President Joko Widodo.

Shortly after taking office last October, Joko declared that Indonesia was facing "a national emergency" of drug abuse, and he rejected 64 clemency appeals from death row drug convicts, most of them foreigners. Saying Indonesia had a right to exercise its drug laws, Joko's government rejected international pleas to cancel the executions, including pleas from Ban Ki-moon, secretary-general of the United Nations.

The executions have angered some of Indonesia's largest aid donors, including Australia and the European Union.

Brazil and the Netherlands withdrew their ambassadors after the January executions, and Australia has said it may do the same this time. France has lodged a diplomatic protest and warned that diplomatic relations with Indonesia could be affected.

Advocates for the convicts have also argued that the Indonesian courts that sentenced their clients were corrupt.

Lawyers for the two Australian convicts, Chan, 31, and Myuran Sukumaran, 34, say the judge who handed down the death penalty to the pair had offered a lighter sentence in exchange for money.

The pair, members of the so-called Bali Nine who were arrested in 2005 trying to smuggle 18.5 pounds of heroin out of the Indonesian resort island, admit their guilty but say they have reformed.

The Indonesian wife of one of the Nigerians, Silvester Obiekwe Nwolise, 47, also claimed that the judges at his trial had offered a lighter sentence in return for a bribe.

Another Nigerian did not have a lawyer when he tried to appeal his death sentence, while the Brazilian convict, Rodrigo Gularte, 42, had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder since he was a teenager, conditions that his lawyers say should have disqualified him from criminal prosecution under Indonesian law.