Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, linked to Bali bombings, to be freed this week

He has completed a 15-year prison term for helping fund paramilitary training in conservative Aceh province

A key figure in militant group Jemaah Islamiah, he was previously jailed over the 2002 Bali bombings but that conviction was quashed on appeal

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Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir will be released from prison this week. Photo: AFP

Published: 11:45pm, 4 Jan 2021Updated: 1:48am, 5 Jan 2021

A radical Indonesian cleric linked to the deadly Bali bombings will be released from prison this week, authorities said on Monday, after an earlier bid to free him early was axed following a public uproar.

Abu Bakar Bashir, 82, once synonymous with militant Islam in the world’s biggest Muslim majority nation, will be freed on Friday after completing a 15-year prison term for helping fund paramilitary training in conservative Aceh province.

He was sentenced in 2011, but the firebrand preacher’s time was cut due to regular sentence reductions handed to most prisoners in Indonesia.

“He will be released on January 8, 2021, as his prison term expired and ended,” Rika Aprianti, spokesman for Indonesia’s corrections agency, said in a statement.

Jemaah Islamiah was blamed for a huge bomb blast at the JW Marriot Hotel in Jakarta in 2003. Photo: EPA

Bashir’s lawyers had appealed for early release citing his old age and risk of contracting Covid-19 in the Southeast Asian nation’s notoriously overcrowded prison system.

Bashir, a key figure in militant group Jemaah Islamiah (JI), was previously jailed over the Bali bombings, but that conviction was quashed on appeal.

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