Hopes For Reprieve Fade As Four Nigerians To Be Executed In Indonesia On Wednesday

By This time tomorrow,these four Nigerian men will be dead...Killed alongside five other nationals for crimes committed over a decade ago.

I am really very sad compiling this report.I know they have paid the price for their crimes..who gives another man the right to kill another albeit the laws of land?....God where are you?Your people are killing each other,making news laws without seeking your face.

I am so angry that despite all the begging,the answer to leave these men alive is still NO!.

let me stop ranting as it has really set me down emotionally,please read the compiled report.

''Amongst the 10 people facing execution by firing squad in Indonesia for drug-related offenses, are 4 Nigerians.  The others are 2 Australian men, a woman from Philippines, an Indonesian man and a French man who has been given a 2weeks  temporary reprieve for a final review of his own case.

50-year-old Nigerian man, Martin Anderson who traveled to Indonesia on a fake Ghanaian passport, was arrested in Jakarta in 2003 on a charge of possessing about 1.8 ounces of heroin and was accused of being part of a local drug ring. He was sentenced to death in 2004.

According to his lawyer, Anderson who was shot in the leg during his arrest, has filed for a judicial review of his conviction and death sentence with the Supreme Court.

Anderson's lawyer however fears that the court would not consider the appeal until after he is executed because such appeals can take six months to be heard, according to him.

Anderson has reportedly been in poor spirits since he was transferred to the execution site, Nusakambangan Island, for execution.

Known in Indonesia’s penal system as “The Death Row Gospel Singer,” 41-year-old Okwudili Oyatanze, also a Nigerian was arrested in 2001 while trying to smuggle 5.5 pounds of heroin through Jakarta’s international airport, in his stomach, after arriving on a flight from Pakistan. He was convicted the following year and sentenced to death.

 Oyatanze has written more than 70 songs and recorded multiple albums behind bars.

 He has performed with prison guards as well as fellow inmates.

Raised in southeastern Nigeria, Oyatanze started a garment business in 1999, traveling to Indonesia to buy clothing to resell in Nigeria. 

His business collapsed, and heavily in debt, Oyatanze, traveled to Pakistan to try to make ends meet following the advice of a fellow Nigerian living there.

He became a courier for drug peddlers, which involved swallowing capsules of heroin before boarding a flight to Jakarta where he was apprehended by law enforcement officials.

Another Nigerian headed for the gallows in Indonesia is Jamiu Owolabi Abashin, aged 50 was living on the streets of Bangkok in 1998 when a fellow African living there took pity on him and brought him home, asking whether he wanted a quick-paying job, in which he would get $400 for bringing a package of clothing to the friend’s wife in Surabaya, Indonesia, where she sold used shirts and pants.

Abashin readily agreed, but soon wished he hadn’t: The package contained nearly 12 pounds of heroin, and he was arrested after landing at Surabaya’s airport. Abashin, who was traveling on a false Spanish passport, realised too late he was tricked into carrying drugs.

He was convicted in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison, which was reduced to 20 years on appeal. State prosecutors however challenged the sentence reduction before the Indonesian Supreme Court, and in 2006,  Abashin's 20 Years sentence  was changed  to a death sentence. 

In a request for presidential clemency in 2008, he admitted knowingly smuggling the drugs. The request was denied in January. 

The Indonesian government refers to him as Raheem Agbaje Salami, the name on the fake Spanish passport he was using when he was arrested.

47-year-old Silvester Obiekwe Nwolise is similar to those of other Nigerians on Indonesia’s death row for drug trafficking. 

Unemployed in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, he was lured to Pakistan by fellow Nigerians on the promise of a job with good wages.

But once in Pakistan, instead of a job, he got an offer to swallow some capsules – filled with goat horn powder - and fly to Indonesia according to his wife, Fatimah Farwin.

“They said they didn’t want to pay tax on it. When he arrived at the airport in Jakarta, the police saw him – I don’t know how – they caught him and X-rayed him, and they found it and it was drugs.” Fatima said.

Arrested in 2001, Mr. Nwolise was convicted the following year of bringing 2.6 pounds of heroin into the country, and was sentenced to death.

According to his wife,  Nwolise had no translator during his trial and his Indonesian lawyer could barely communicate with him. She said that a judge, through an intermediary, offered to sentence him to prison rather than death if he paid a bribe of 200 million rupiah, worth about $22,000 at the time.

“But he was just a poor courier. He didn’t have any money,” Fatimah said.

Ms. Fatimah, who is Indonesian, met Mr. Nwolise in prison in 2007, when she was accompanying a friend who was visiting another inmate. The two married later that year; they have since had two children, now 5 and 3, but she has not brought them to see him since they were infants. She has told them that their father is working in an office in another country.

In January, the Indonesian police accused Mr. Nwolise of running a drug syndicate from prison. No charges were brought, but Ms. Fatimah, who says emphatically that her husband is innocent of the accusation, believes it resulted in his being placed in the group of inmates now facing imminent execution.

“Some woman on the outside blamed him,” Ms. Fatimah said, referring to a police informant, “but when they came to his cell, they never found anything – never, never, never. He never had a trial and next thing, they wanted to execute him.”

According to daily mail, it has been confirmed they will be executed just after the stroke of midnight on Wednesday (3am AEST).

The date - April 29 - became official when a local funeral director in Cilacap, the nearest port to Nusakambangan, or Death Island, was instructed to inscribe the names of those to be shot by firing squad and the date of their deaths on each coffin.

The coffins have been transported to the death island.

Another news source says on Saturday, the Bali Nine death row inmates were given 72 hours notice ahead of their deaths and were also asked to sign their death warrants.

**original reportage by New York Times rewritten here **

Photo Credit : New York Times / Daily Mail