The nine prisoners will be executed separately, in turn, after midnight Jakarta time.

Each will have a separate firing squad of 12 officers. Three of the 12 guns will contain live rounds.

In March, the Guardian spoken to a police officer who has been part of a firing squad on Nusa Kambangan. He told my colleague Kate Lamb about his role:

The mental burden is heavier for the officers that are responsible for handling the prisoners rather than shooting them.

Because those officers are involved in picking them up, and tying their hands together, until they are gone.

A wing of the Indonesian police corps known as the Mobile Brigade (“Brimob”) carries out the executions on top of its regular duties. They are not full-time executioners but special police officers assigned to the job. They are paid less than $100 on top of their existing salary to carry out their grim task.

I don’t make conversation with the prisoners. I treat them like they are a member of my own family.

I say only: ‘I’m sorry, I am just doing the job.’

Of being part of the firing squad, the officer describes the experience with detachment:

We just come in, grab the weapon, shoot, and wait for the dying to finish. Once the ‘bam’ of the gun we wait 10 minutes, if the doctor pronounces him dead then we return, that’s about it.

It doesn’t take more than five minutes to be over.

The officer said he sees his role as simply doing his duty:

I am bound by my oath as a soldier. The prisoner violated the law and we are carrying out a command. We are just the executors. The question of whether it is sin or not is up to God.

Pulling the trigger is the easy part, the officer says as he contemplates the executions which are to come.

The worst part is the human touch, he says, the connection with those who are about to die. The executioner has to lace the prisoner’s limbs, hands and feet to a cross-shaped pole with thick rope. It is that final moment of brutal intimacy that haunts.

“The mental burden is heavier for the officers that are responsible for handling the prisoners rather than shooting them,” he says. “Because those officers are involved in picking them up, and tying their hands together, until they are gone.”


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The officer – a young man who wanted to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of his role – is part of a wing of the Indonesian police corps known as the Mobile Brigade (“Brimob”).

The brigade carries out the executions on top of its regular duties. They are not full-time executioners but rather special police officers assigned to the job.

They are paid less than $100 on top of their existing salary to carry out their grim task.

The officer spoke exclusively to the Guardian, describing the bleakest moments of what he called “his job”, of being the last person to touch the prisoner just moments before they are “released from life”.

The act of execution happens in a jungle-skirted clearing on the prison island of Nusa Kambangan.

One team is assigned to escort and shackle the prisoners, a second team is the firing squad. This officer has been on both of those teams.

“We see the person close up, from when they are alive and talking, until they die,” he said. “We know it [that moment] precisely.”

Five Brimob officers are assigned to each prisoner, to escort them from the isolation cells in the middle of the night and accompany them to the clearing.

Bali Nine composite
Bali Nine drugs smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. Photograph: supplied
The officer says prisoners can “decide if they want to cover their face” before they are tied up to make sure their heart or the position of their body does not move.

Moments before, the prisoner has the option to seek religious counsel.

Using a thick rope known as “tali tambang” in Indonesian, the officer says he avoids speaking to the prisoners when he binds their hands behind their back and onto the poles, kneeling or standing as they wish, but that he treats the prisoners gently.

“I don’t make conversation with the prisoners. I treat them like they are a member of my own family,” he explains, “I say only, ‘I’m sorry, I am just doing the job.’

He says that by the time he escorts the prisoners from their cells to the clearing “they are resigned to their fate, as though it was written like lines on their palm”.


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