Indonesia | Woman sentenced to seven years for terrorism plot
Dian Yulia Novi (center)
A would-be suicide bomber was sentenced to seven and a half years prison for plotting to bomb a guard-changing ceremony at Indonesia’s presidential palace in Jakarta, her lawyer said Monday.
The lawyer, Kamsi, who uses a single name, said that her client Dian Yulia Novi, 28, will give birth within days and doesn’t plan to appeal.
Novi was arrested in December after police detected the plot to bomb the ceremony, a popular family attraction in the capital, Jakarta.
She was among four suspected militants that included her husband, Solihin, arrested one day before the planned attack.
A three-judge panel sentenced Novi on Friday immediately after hearing the last presentation from her lawyers, shortening the usual process due to the woman being in the final days of her pregnancy.
“She planned to run close to the presidential guards during the ceremony and blow herself up with a pressure cooker bomb,” said the presiding judge, Syafrudin Ainor Rafiek, at the East Jakarta District Court. “The defendant has been proven guilty of violating the anti-terror law.”
Prosecutors had sought a 10-year prison term for Novi, a former migrant worker in Singapore and Taiwan.
Kamsi said that Novi wasn’t aware of her pregnancy until several weeks after being arrested.
In a separate trial at the same court, the judges sentenced a second woman, Tutin, to three and a half years in prison for hiding information about the plot from authorities.
Police say Tutin helped to radicalize Novi, encouraged her to become a suicide bomber and introduced Novi to Solihin.
Prosecutors have requested 15 years in prison for Solihin, the alleged leader of a small extremist cell in Central Java’s Solo city, and eight years for a fourth suspected militant, Agus Supriadi. Their verdicts are expected in mid-September.
Solihin previously told Indonesian TV that he married Novi as his second wife to facilitate her desire to become a suicide bomber.
Novi said in a television interview after her arrest that she learned about jihad on social media and was influenced by articles written by Aman Abdurrahman, a radical cleric who police last week declared was the key suspect behind a suicide bombing and gun attack that killed eight people in Jakarta last year.
She admitted during her trial that she took orders from Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian with the Islamic State group in Syria accused of orchestrating several attacks in Indonesia. AP
