Noor Rachmad, deputy attorney-general, said the four individuals were killed by firing squad not long after midnight local time on the penal island of Nusa Kambangan.
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“We will see when the right time will be”, Prasetyo told reporters.
Ricky Gunawan, a lawyer from Community Legal Aid Institute who represented Jefferson and Utami, said the government’s unpredictable handling of the process was “tantamount to torture”.
The National Commission on Violence Against Women, which has been lobbying for Utami to receive clemency, called for answers over the fate of the 10 remaining prisoners.
“The executions are only aimed at halting drug crimes”, he said, adding that the rest “will be carried out in stages”.
I can say that the four executed inmates had important roles either as kingpin, supplier, distributor, providers, and producer as well as importer and even acted as exporters of the drugs.
The government had said earlier in the week that 14 people on death row, mostly foreigners, would be executed this week for drug crimes.
For Indonesia, the death penalty is a positive law that is still effective here, and it’s not against human rights under the context of the 1945 constitution, ” Foreign Ministry spokesman, Armanatha Nasir said during a press conference.
The calls to halt the executions have gone unheeded and Widodo has said that drugs pose as serious a threat as terrorism in what is one of Southeast Asia’s biggest markets for narcotics.
The president’s office cites figures that drugs are killing at least 40 people a day, but “several global experts have questioned the methodology used to arrive at those statistics”, Reuters says.
The death penalty is widely accepted by the Indonesian public, but police had to break up a protest outside the prison on Thursday by members of a migrant workers group who called for mercy for the Indonesian woman who was scheduled to be executed. It “has some of the world’s toughest drug laws”, says BBC News, “and has faced intense criticism internationally for resuming executions”.
The execution of Pakistani death row prisoner, Zulfiqar Ali, accused for drug smuggling in Indonesia has been halted, Pakistan’s ambassador in Jakarta confirmed on Friday.
Authorities plan to execute 16 prisoners this year and more than double that number in 2017.
An Indonesian English-language newspaper apologised on Friday after it ran a front-page story erroneously declaring that 14 drug convicts had been executed.
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The four men were tied to a post and shot in a jungle clearing on the remote island. “The failure to do the verification before running the story is completely unprofessional”, it said.
