One of his executioners told him in 2003, while he was being tortured in one of the CIA’s secret prisons, that he “Do not pass[ait] never in court, “because we can never let the world know what I did to you” ”. The testimony appears from page 4 of the US Senate report on secret prisons from the US Central Intelligence Agency, published in December 2014.
This Monday, August 30, at 8:40 am, Encep Nurjaman (better known by his nom de guerre “Hambali”) nevertheless appeared for the first time before a special military tribunal in Guantanamo. White tunic in batik fabric, black prayer hat, the man is shod in orthopedic shoes, wears glasses of scales and reveals a collar of red beard while removing his mask, cracking sometimes with a broad smile. Aged 57, this Indonesian presented as head of the Indonesian jihadist organization Jemaah Islamiyah, affiliated with Al-Qaida, spent years in CIA prisons. He was initially arrested in Thailand in August 2003 before being transferred to Guantanamo in September 2006, where he remained in solitary for more than ten years.
On Monday, he appeared with two suspected accomplices, Malaysians Mohammed Nazir Ben Lep, 44, and Mohamed Farik Ben Amin, 46, for the attacks in a Bali nightclub on October 12, 2002, which resulted in the death of 202 people, and at the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta on August 5, 2003 (12 dead). All three have so far languished without trial in the Guantanamo jails.
The machine started to move in 2016, when the Obama administration attempted to send Ben Amin back to his country on the condition that he testify against his two alleged accomplices. The case failed. The Guantanamo district attorney drafted an indictment, which was ready in 2019, but was not signed until January 21, the day Joe Biden was inducted into the White House. Questions are rife on the reasons for this trial. Still, this indictment, the first since 2014, revives the judicial machine at Guantanamo.
Reading without objections
The teams of prosecutor Matthew Hracho read for an hour and a half the charges against the three men, which do not carry the death penalty: murder and attempted murder in violation of the laws of war, willful injury, terrorism, attack civilians and civilian property, conspiracy. The indictment seeks to retrace the course of the three men and to make a coherent account of it, made of allegiance to Osama Bin Laden and collaboration with Khalid Cheikh Mohammed, nicknamed “KCM” (“KSM” by the Americans) , suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks and also interned in Guantanamo. Encep Nurjaman, who was on the UN terrorist list before his arrest, joined the jihad in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and then recruited fighters to operate in Southeast Asia. In 2000, he would have sent his two Malaysian co-defendants, Ben Lep and Ben Amin, to train in an Afghan Al-Qaida camp, where they were entitled to a visit from Osama bin Laden.
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