Lenient Term for Bali Plotter Causes Dismay

The US and Australia expressed dismay yesterday when an Indonesian Islamist cleric widely regarded as a terrorist leader was jailed for 30 months for his part in the 2002 Bali bombing.

Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, 66, was convicted of conspiracy in the bombing which killed 202 people at two nightclubs. But he was found not guilty of direct involvement in the bombing, and was also cleared of any connection with the 2003 blast at the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta.

Ba'asyir, his legal team, and hundreds of supporters who flocked to the court were nevertheless outraged at the conviction, one lawyer describing it as a "face-saving political strategy".

Australia and the US, which pressed Jakarta to prosecute Ba'asyir after he was acquitted of other terrorist offences in 2003, expressed their disappointment at the sentence's leniency .

"We believe the results are not commensurate with Ba'asyir's culpability," said Richard Boucher, a US state department spokesman.

The Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, said: "We'd have liked a longer sentence.

"He has without any doubt been a spiritual inspiration to [radical militant group] Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, and Jemaah Islamiyah is linked with al-Qaida and other terrorist networks."

The five judges ruled that Ba'asyir had approved the bombing. "The defendant has been proved legally and convincingly to have committed the crime of evil conspiracy that caused fire that left other people dead," they said in their verdict.

"The defendant knew that the perpetrators of the bombing were people who have been trained in bomb-making in Pakistan and Afghanistan."

Ba'asyir responded with a long prayer, in which he said: "God protect us from evil and its allies."

His lawyers said he would appeal, because the verdict was legally unsound, as it was based solely on an affidavit by one of the convicted Bali bombers which was not corroborated during the trial.

The judges noted that many witnesses had described Ba'asyir as the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, the terror network linked to al-Qaida, but they did not rule on the question.