Calls for Australian trial for Bali bomber

ELEANOR HALL: The Australian Government is distancing itself from a suggestion that one of the masterminds of the Bali Bombings should face trial here, rather than in Indonesia.

Umar Patek is now in Pakistan where he was arrested earlier this year but the head of Indonesia's anti-terrorism agency told Fairfax newspapers that Patek could inspire violence from jihadis if he were to be tried in Indonesia and that he could coordinate terrorist networks from inside the prison.

Simon Santow has the latest.

SIMON SANTOW: Umar Patek may not be a household name in Australia, but in Indonesia his arrest earlier this year was considered very significant.

CARL UNGERER: Umar Patek was one of the senior members of the Jemaah Islamiah organisation in the early 1990s. He along with a lot of his comrades had spent some time training and in Afghanistan during the 1990s, had come back and was a key figure in the lead-up to the 2002 Bali bombings.

SIMON SANTOW: Carl Ungerer is the director of the national security program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

CARL UNGERER: As a half-Arab, half-Indonesian he was someone who could move easily between the two cultural areas and provided a key link for that connection between Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah.

SIMON SANTOW: He's done extensive work inside Indonesian jails, and written about the ways in which suspected and convicted terrorists are treated inside the justice system.

Carl Ungerer says Umar Patek is a formidable terrorist. He's not a bomb-making technician but is an organiser and a committed religious fanatic.

CARL UNGERER: Like all of these jihadis, he has a very virulent and anti-Western ideology based on you know, a distorted view of religion and he would, there has been no indication that he has moved away from those views.

SIMON SANTOW: International law experts say there's nothing stopping Australia from extraditing Patek from Pakistan and trying him as an alleged terrorist in courts here, although it does complicate the job of coordinating evidence and arranging witnesses.

Professor Don Rothwell is from the Australian National University in Canberra.

DONALD ROTHWELL: There was a raft of counter terrorism legislation enacted post-9/11 and in the early part of 2002 so the provisions for the Crimes Act are fairly detailed now in terms of offences that were committed against Australian nationals virtually anywhere in the world.

And there’s also an interesting argument that Patek and the other Bali bombers could have committed a crime against humanity which would also trigger Australian criminal legislation.

SIMON SANTOW: Leanne Brown was 25 and in Paddy's Bar in Bali when the bombs went off back in 2002.

Now nine years later she's had her first child and the burns that scarred 25 per cent of her body are not as painful as they once were.

LEANNE BROWN: When I hear anything about the Indonesian justice system I just - corrupt. It is just, you know, you hear stories that they are let out for coffees, you can buy your way in Bali so to me, by putting them in jail, it is not really serving a purpose there because they have still got the freedom.

They don’t, it is not as, Indonesia doesn't seem to be as strict and as horrible in Australia. It is sort of like they go there and they still have a say.

SIMON SANTOW: She says that while she has more faith in justice Australian-style, bringing Patek here, she feels is also not ideal.

LEANNE BROWN: When they are closer to Australia they can also, in our jail corrupt people to start to get into the terrorism so I suppose at least in Bali they’re further away where if you bring them to Australia they are closer to Australians so then they can hurt us again.

SIMON SANTOW: Carl Ungerer says that while the system is different in Indonesia, Patek could still be held there and kept in some form of isolation.

CARL UNGERER: He was brought back to Indonesia he would probably find himself in one of the police lock-ups probably in Jakarta where they hold a number of other senior JI leaders.

They probably would not want to put him into one of the larger prisons because of the concern that he would use that opportunity to incite violence amongst some of the other prisoners, so holding him in a different kind of detention I assumed would be the option until he could be tried.

SIMON SANTOW: But there would presumably be quite a time lag before that might happen?

CARL UNGERER: Yeah, difficult to say Simon. It is, you know, cases like the Abu Bakar Bashir case, you know, he was tried and arrested in 2004/2005 yet again this year has only just gone through another trial process. These things do take time and in consistent with the Indonesian legal process, he wouldn't quickly find himself in front of a court.

ELEANOR HALL: That is security analyst Carl Ungerer from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, ending Simon Santow's report