Hotel Kerobokan

by Kathryn Bonella

  Within a couple of days, many Balinese and western prisoners were displaying their anger by hurling stones at the bomber’s tower as they walked past on their way to the blue room, and by wearing black T-shirts, designed and cut in Hotel K’s printing factory, with orange and yellow ‘Fuck terrorist’ slogans slashed across the front.

  A second terrorist, Abdul Aziz, best known by his self-created title Imam Samudra, meaning ‘preacher of the oceans’, checked in a month later. Swarming police and a scrum of journalists circled him as he walked from the police van and through Hotel K’s front door. Journalists yelled questions, but ‘Allah is great. Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar’ was his only response. It was the same chant he’d screamed over and over in court, displaying only glee for the mass killings he’d choreographed, right down to selecting the nightclubs, recruiting the suicide bombers and designating Amrozi to buy the chemicals to make the bomb. When Samudra checked in, a new era of terrorist teaching began in Hotel K, with the killer preaching his beliefs every chance he got.

  He was put in a cell next to Amrozi’s at the front of the tower block. It was a room with a view, giving him a platform to lecture to anyone walking past. He looked directly across at the junction of the path and the doors to the offices, where prisoners usually farewelled their visitors. If couples dared to kiss goodbye, he’d scream at them through his barred window in response to their forbidden public display. When female inmates walked past, he’d intimidate them by angrily screaming, ‘Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar’, because they weren’t shrouded from head to toe.

  By then, Hotel K housed thirty-five terrorists involved in the nightclub blasts. Thirty were there on lesser charges, such as working as drivers or sheltering the bombers. These inmates were all locked in Block J, near the mosque. The five key players were caged separately. The death row trio – Samudra, Amrozi and his brother Mukhlas – were in cells inside the water tower. Previously, these cells had been used for everything from isolating prisoners, to functioning as a small shop, a library and VIP rooms. Former Bali governor Ida Bagus Oka had spent time in a VIP tower cell during his embezzlement case. He was notorious for giving the nod to re-zone sacred land for controversial multi-million-dollar building projects, earning him the nickname ‘Mr OK’ and fuelling widespread suspicion that he took lucrative backhanders. With the help of his lawyer, he was exonerated on the embezzlement charges.

  He [the judge] claimed the verdict was based solely on legal considerations, and not because, as many people have speculated, the judges had been bribed or too intimidated to convict the powerful Oka.

  – Jakarta Post, 9 April 2002

  Before it was modified into maximum-security cells for the terrorists, the tower had been used for storing axes, grass slashers and other gardening equipment. The walls were rebuilt to eradicate any face-to-face contact and the terrorists had to shout out to hear each other. Outside, the metal picket fence topped with barbed wire created an outdoor pen. Behind the tower were a further four cells used for isolating inmates. Two of these were now occupied by the other two key terrorists – Mubarok, and Amrozi’s younger brother, Ali Imron, both of whom were serving life sentences.

  Despite being locked away in the tower, the terrorists had an overwhelming presence. Their fanatical beliefs were penetrating the jail, eagerly soaked up by bored, uneducated and easily impressed Muslim guards and inmates who were in awe of the terrorists. Guards on tower duty would sit in the hot sun for hours talking to the terrorists. The most blatantly star-struck guard was Dedi, who trailed behind them like a puppy when they walked across to the mosque each day. Amrozi and Samudra would sit like celebrities talking to fans in front of the mosque before midday prayers. For drug dealers, petty thieves and card sharks, it was something new. Mingling with some of the world’s most notorious terrorists gave a boring day a bit of zing. Tommy, a 22-year-old ecstasy dealer, soaked it all up like a sponge. He was soon working for Samudra; ironing his clothes, buying food for him at the canteen, and selling scented massage oil around the jail to raise cash for further terrorist attacks. The awestruck boy, who’d been less than devout before the terrorists checked in, was now fanatical, insisting that his fiancée wear full Muslim dress and cover her face. She obeyed him for her visits, but tore off the garb as soon as she walked outside Hotel K. Their usual sex in the blue room stopped abruptly, and they no longer even kissed goodbye.

  Early one morning, all five terrorists walked the fifty metres along the path from their tower cells past the canteen, to the mosque. It was the first time they were all allowed out together. They stood hugging in front of the mosque; it was the end of the Ramadan fast. Never failing to seize a chance to preach, Samudra began to call out, ‘Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar’. The jail boss was shocked to see how easily Samudra incited the others – more than four hundred prisoners screamed back, ‘Allah Akbar’. The boss hadn’t had any sense of the insidious influence the terrorists were having in his jail until that moment. It was a nasty shock.

  He took swift action to tighten security. He transferred Dedi to a jail in Java, as a stark warning to all guards not to get too close to the terrorists. He moved Samudra to a cell at the back of the tower. He restricted them to one hour of sun every second day in the tower pen and permitted mosque visits on Fridays only. Life got tough for the terrorists – the way it was supposed to have been from the outset. They were served slop prison food in tins pushed into their cells three times a day, now rarely supplemented by canteen fare. Visits with their families were also curtailed.

  From then on, the death row trio spent their days in their cells praying, reading religious texts, and yelling through the walls to each other or to the endless rotation of inmates doing stints in one of the two vacant isolation cells out the back. But the isolation did nothing to impede Samudra spreading his message of hate. He spoke to fellow fanatics on his mobile phone, but, most dangerously, had wide-sweeping access to people in cyberspace. Initially, he used fellow inmate Iwan’s laptop, after the Muslim drug dealer was elected spokesman for the terrorists and officially allowed into their cells. Samudra used it to enter chat rooms, where he would recruit terrorists and raise cash. Agung Setyadi, a lecturer in economics at Semarang State University, was one cyber recruit who did his bit for terrorism. Samudra sent him $470 to buy a laptop, which the lecturer sent via motorcycle courier under his daughter’s name, Annisa, to a Hotel K residence that housed unmarried guards.

  At the house, Muslim guard Beni Irawan was ready to collect it. He was motivated to help the terrorists by a personal vendetta against the Balinese. He had been viciously bashed by Bali’s Laskar gang members for refusing to let them out of jail one night, and the incident was simply dismissed. If nobody was going to punish the Balinese gang, Beni would avenge himself. He wrapped the laptop in newspaper and delivered it to Samudra in his cell whenever the terrorist asked for it.

  While the Indonesian legal system kept granting appeals and extending his life, Samudra was using his time to direct the killing of another twenty-three people. Sitting on his bed in his tower cell, he recruited three suicide bombers for the second round of bomb blasts in Bali, in 2005. The guard, Beni Irawan, was later sentenced to five years jail for giving him the laptop, and lecturer Agung Setyadi got six years for sending it.

  One of the 2002 Bali bombers used a laptop smuggled to him in jail to help organize the triple suicide blasts that rocked the resort island last year, Indonesian Police say.… ‘Imam Samudra directed the fundraising for the second Bali bombing,’ cyber crime unit police chief Petrus Golose said.

  – Reuters, 24 August 2006

  The police recently revealed that Imam Samudra had recruited the perpetrators of the second Bali bombing through the Internet.

  – Jakarta Post, 14 September 2006

  Last week anti-terror officers learned that Samudra had been recruiting young people in cyberspace, chatting with them through a laptop smuggled into his prison cell in Kerobokan, Bali.

  –New
Straits Times, September 2006

  In his Hotel K cell, Samudra also wrote his autobiography, Me Against The Terrorist. The book sold out its first print run of 4000, earning him royalties – not confiscated under any proceeds of crime legislation – to fund future terror attacks. Cash was vital to the terrorist network, and via mobile phone and the internet he successfully got sympathisers to empty their pockets. He also recommended the use of online credit card fraud as the cutting-edge way to raise cash for terror, and devoted a chapter of his book to this practice. But the terrorists weren’t limited to talking to a niche market. Samudra, Mukhlas and Amrozi also kept high media profiles, doing countless sanctioned print and television interviews with journalists around the world.

  Samudra and Amrozi also made smaller amounts of cash from businesses inside Hotel K: Samudra selling his scented oils; and Amrozi selling phone credit, using inmates as sales boys. Austrian drug dealer Thomas was a regular customer for phone credit, burning it up fast in his business. He avoided dealing directly with Amrozi until the day he got ripped off. He complained to the sales boy that he’d been sold a spent phone card and the boy took him across to the tower. The terrorist was sunning himself in the pen. Through the fence, Thomas told him about the problem. Amrozi simply turned, apologised and offered to swap it.

  But while the terrorists were busy recruiting, they’d had one of their own turn his back on them. Amrozi’s younger brother, Ali Imron, had turned police informant and exposed the matrix behind the blasts. He gave details of his own role – mixing more than a ton of chemicals into bombs and packing the lethal explosives into fluorescent pink, green and blue plastic filing cabinets fixed to the floor of a white Mitsubishi van. Then, on the chosen night, he drove the white van and two suicide bombers to Kuta, and parked the van five hundred metres up the road from the target clubs and the crowds of tourists out for a night of dancing. Ali Imron also confessed to training the two suicide bombers; the first got out of the van and walked along the street in his explosive vest, down to Paddy’s Bar and onto the crowded dance floor, where he detonated it. Terrified survivors fled out onto the street and straight into the second bigger van bomb explosion; all timed and choreographed perfectly to maximise the carnage.

  But Ali Imron was now sorry for his part in the massacre, crying in court and apologising. For his treachery, his two brothers and Samudra harassed him through the walls of the tower, yelling insults and taunting him with a mantra that his corpse wouldn’t be fragrant after death if he didn’t die a martyr. But the repentant killer didn’t recant. He was on a good wicket. His change of heart had saved him from a death sentence; instead he’d been given a life sentence in jails with revolving doors to the good life outside.

  One day, while most people believed Amrozi’s little brother was languishing in a stinking, rat-infested cell in Hotel K next to his big brother, he was actually drinking coffee at Starbucks and eating dinner at the Hard Rock Café in a new entertainment movie complex beside Plaza Indonesia, one of Jakarta’s most exclusive shopping malls. He was sitting with police boss Pak Gorries and several black-clad armed police. He regularly spent hours out of jail in this way, as part of Indonesia’s anti-terror strategy. The assumption was that police would get more information from him sitting in Starbucks than in a jail cell. So, while his brothers were eating slop, he was sipping lattés, eating cheeseburgers and browsing in the windows of luxury designer shops alongside Jakarta’s most elite shoppers.

  Pestered by the two reporters as to why he was drinking with the police chief, Ali Imron was reported as saying this was not the first time. ‘I often wander around with Pak [Mr] Gorries,’ Detik quoted him as saying. But one of the plain clothed policemen immediately silenced him. ‘You have no right to talk,’ Detik reported.

  – Courier Mail, 3 September 2004

  What, do you think that going out for a walk is forbidden? Brig-Gen Gorries said. I walk often with Pak [Brig-Gen] Gorries, Ali Imron said, his head lowered and flanked by several black-clad armed police.

  – PNG Post Courier, 3 September 2004

  Inside Hotel K, the bombers’ influence persisted, visible in ways as subtle as guards growing goatee beards. The initial anger among the inmates had waned into complacency, with them all busily absorbed in their own daily headaches. But Balinese people outside the prison were fuming that the terrorists were still alive nearly three years after the massacre, and called for a stop to the unending appeals and for the guns to come out. But instead the terrorists struck again in the triple suicide blasts that Samudra directed from his Hotel K cell. It was twelve days before the third anniversary of the first blasts. Two men blew themselves up in a strip of casual fish restaurants on the beach at Jimbaran Bay, and a third in a steak house in the tourist heart of Kuta. Twenty-three people were killed, including the three suicide bombers.

  Balinese anger turned to fury. The paradise island was a zone of death and destruction again. No-one felt safe. Nowhere was safe now – even beaches were a target. All hotels searched the bags of all guests. Restaurants and shops ran metal detectors over customers’ bodies and bags. The island was a war zone, as far from an idyllic tropical island as it could get. Bali was braced for more attacks at the three-year memorial services for the first blasts. Security was visibly heavy. Snipers were perched on rooftops, hundreds of police lined the small lanes leading to the service, and five armoured vans were parked close by. But no bombs exploded that day. It was the Balinese anger that finally blew, outside Hotel K later that afternoon.

  ‘Kill Amrozi, kill, kill, kill’, ‘Bring back our peaceful Bali’, ‘Kill Amrozi now’. More than 1500 people were taking out their fury on Hotel K, kicking the front fence, tearing at the gates and pelting stones onto the roof. Eight Balinese gamelan groups – one hundred and fifty musicians – were beating drums and xylophones, creating loud rhythmic music, invigorating the locals into a hypnotic frenzy. Protesters thrashed the front iron gates back and forth until they ripped off, stomping on them and screaming, ‘Kill Amrozi!’ Others attacked the low concrete fence stretching along the road, kicking it until it collapsed.

  Fired by the beating of drums, the crowd surged towards the front doors but was blocked by three hundred riot police standing with shields and batons along the front wall. One protester charged forwards wielding a long iron spear above his head. He threw it at a concrete slab, screaming: ‘Bali has already been destroyed. It will make no difference if we raze this prison to the ground.’ In nearby streets, it was chaos. Traffic was gridlocked. Police had shut all roads leading to the jail. Local traders had also shut up shop, fearing an escalation of violence. But the insanity outside had instilled a calm within Hotel K. Prisoners sat listening to the stones crashing onto the roof and the screams of the protesters, desperately hoping they’d break down the front wall and create an easy escape route. They were ready to run. Some had even packed their bags.

  But it wasn’t to be. The riot fired for two hours and then fizzled out. The Balinese police boss knew the hypnotic power of music for his people and when he finally got the gamelan troupes to stop playing, the emotional tension instantly vanished. Protesters soon dispersed, leaving behind a demolished fence and gate, and a single banner flapping on a pole with the poignant message. ‘Hello SBY [Indonesia’s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono]. Kill the person who has hurt Bali [Amrozi].’

  ‘It is a natural response from a wounded community that has been treated insensitively by the central government. In fact, it is a mild response compared to the anger that is seething in our hearts,’ a protest leader Madra Adnyana said.

  – Jakarta Post, 13 October 2005

  But their protest had missed its mark. The death row trio had been smuggled out of Hotel K wearing black hoods and hustled into armoured cars, a day earlier. Police were aware that the protest outside Hotel K was planned and had feared a security nightmare on the anniversary. An entourage of two hundred police armed with machine guns escorted the hooded men to the tourist island
’s main airport in Denpasar. They were immediately put on a police charter flight to Cilicap, a Muslim-dominated coastal town. Then, from the small local harbour, they took a final ten-minute boat ride across the water to their new home, the notorious penal colony Nusakambangan. Dubbed Indonesia’s Alcatraz, it was a bushy, sun-kissed tropical island with a nasty scar of seven maximum-security prisons stretching along its coastal road.

  The terrorists spent another three years living on Nusakambangan while their lawyers appealed. Throughout these years, the celebrity terrorists were permitted to do many more press and television interviews, spreading their twisted ideals, including holding a press conference close to the end. Then finally, one night six years after the Kuta blasts, thirty paramilitary police masked in black balaclavas entered their death row cells, shackled the three hand and foot, and led them shuffling out of the jail to waiting trucks. Separately, they were driven three kilometres in convoy to a clearing. There they were tied to wooden posts several metres apart, with Amrozi in the middle. They were then shot dead.

  The explosive bang of thirty-six simultaneous shots, fired by three teams of twelve specially trained shooters, echoed across Nusakambangan. The sound of the bullets that pierced the terrorists’ hearts sent shivers down the spines of at least one hundred and sixteen prisoners in Indonesia’s jails, who were threatened with the same fate. Hundreds of kilometres away in Bali, it was an icy reality check for three young Australians and a Nigerian who were living under the shadow of death in Hotel K. The execution line was moving. Australian death row inmate Scott Rush was shocked.