JAKARTA, Indonesia — Defying international condemnation and rejecting 11th-hour pleas for clemency, the Indonesian government moved ahead with plans to execute nine death row drug convicts early Wednesday, including eight foreigners, in what is believed to be the largest mass execution in the country in decades.
Ambulances carrying nine coffins arrived on Tuesday on the prison island of Nusa Kambangan off the southern coast of Java. Relatives and friends of the condemned visited them there for a final time on Tuesday.
“We are confirmed for the nine people to go to execution,” said Tony Spontana, a spokesman for the Indonesian attorney general’s office.
The prisoners from Australia, the Philippines, Brazil and Nigeria, along with one Indonesian, are to face separate police firing squads at an execution site outside the gates of Pasir Putih prison on the island.
It will be the second mass execution in Indonesia this year. In January, five foreign drug convicts and one Indonesian convicted of murder were executed on the island.
On Saturday, the attorney general’s office gave 72 hours’ notice to the condemned, their legal teams and their respective embassies that the executions would be carried out.
On Monday, an Australian prisoner, Andrew Chan, married his Indonesian fiancée in a small wedding ceremony at the prison.
A French citizen who was also on the list to be executed won a two-week reprieve by the State Administrative Court in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, which will hear his challenge to a clemency rejection by President Joko Widodo.
Shortly after taking office last October, Mr. Joko declared that Indonesia was facing “a national emergency” of drug abuse, and he rejected 64 clemency appeals from death row drug convicts, most of them foreigners. His government has rejected international pleas to cancel the executions, including from Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations, saying Indonesia had a right to exercise its drug laws.
The rash of executions has angered some of Indonesia’s largest aid donors, including Australia and the European Union.
Brazil and the Netherlands withdrew their ambassadors after the January executions, and Australia has said it may do the same this time. France has lodged a diplomatic protest and warned that diplomatic relations with Indonesia could be affected.
Advocates for the convicts have also argued that the Indonesian courts that sentenced their clients were corrupt.
Lawyers for the two Australian convicts, Mr. Chan, 31, and Myuran Sukumaran, 34, say the judge who handed down the death penalty to the pair had offered a lighter sentence in exchange for money. The pair, members of the so-called Bali Nine who were arrested in 2005 trying to smuggle 18.5 pounds of heroin out of the Indonesian resort island, admit their guilt but say they have reformed.
The Indonesian wife of one of the Nigerians, Silvester Obiekwe Nwolise, 47, also claimed that the judges at his trial had offered a lighter sentence in return for a bribe.
Another Nigerian did not have a lawyer when he tried to appeal his death sentence, while the Brazilian convict, Rodrigo Gularte, 42, has had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder since he was a teenager, conditions that his lawyers say should have disqualified him from criminal prosecution under Indonesian law.
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