A survivor of the 2002 Bali Bombings has called for judges to consider the pain he and other victims have gone through when sentencing two men who have pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges more than 20 years after the terror attack.
Jan Laczynski was at the popular holiday destination the night of the terrorist attack, which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.
Five of them were Laczynski’s close mates.
”I will never see [them] again, I hope the judges think about that before they consider any sort of sentence reduction,” he told 9News.
“For us the pain never goes away, it never leaves us, a lot of us still have nightmares.”
Mohammed Farik bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir bin Lep, two men allegedly involved with terrorist ringleader Hambali, have pled guilty to conspiracy charges in the US.
The US government has agreed to a maximum sentence of 25 years in response to the guilty plea.
Laczynski says he hopes the judges in charge of their sentencing take the pain they’ve caused into consideration.
“It’s just a brutal reminder that these people [may] be getting their freedom back, and we’ll never see our family again,” he said.
“I just hope the judges think about that before they even consider sentence reductions.
“I feel the appropriate sentence is life in jail.”
In their plea, they claim that Hambali pushed them to join terror group Al Qaeda’s military training, however, they say they did not know about the Bali Bombings.
They admitted to helping Hambali, the ring leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah terror group, evade authorities until 2003.
“We welcome the fact that the terrorists responsible for these attacks are now finally being held accountable for their actions,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said following the guilty pleas.
“We pay tribute to the courage and resilience shown by those whose lives were forever changed by those horrific acts of terrorism.”
Bin Lep and Bin Amin swore an oath of allegiance to Osama Bin Laden, and were arrested in relation to the bombing in 2003. They have been detained at Guantanamo Bay since 2006.
