These included Pakistani Zulfiqar Ali, whom rights groups say was beaten into confessing to the crime of heroin possession, leading to his 2005 death sentence. It could be related to a major storm that plagued Nusa Kambangan island overnight but it could also be that Indonesian authorities need to recheck the legal aspects of these executions.
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Four other Nigerians are among those awaiting execution.
President Joko Widodo believes Indonesia faces an emergency due to rising drugs consumption and has dramatically escalated the use of capital punishment, putting to death 14 drug convicts, mostly foreigners, since he took power in 2014.
Deputy Attorney-General for General Crimes, Noor Rachmad, made the announcement and reiterated that Indonesia does not want to kill people, it just wants to stop the drug trafficking and this is the only way to do it.
Family members of Michael Titus Igweh, a Nigerian prisoner, said his case was still under review.
Indonesia ended a four-year unofficial moratorium on the death penalty in March 2013.
“Thank God, my client can still breathe”, he said.
Australian drug convicts Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were executed after numerous appeals from supporters who claimed they were reformed. But one prisoner, a woman from the Philippines, was spared the death penalty at the last minute.
“They felt they were targeted by the government of Indonesia only because they are Nigerians, only because they are Africans, and their governments did not do anything” to help them, he said.
“This can not happen. I am very concerned. I hope he will be fine because I took all his clothes including his oxygen tank”.
Amnesty International said some of the cases were emblematic of systemic flaws within the Indonesian justice system.
But Indonesia refuses to yield in the face of condemnation.
Manto, a newspaper seller, also agreed with the death penalty.
“Drug crimes are generally not considered to meet this threshold”.
Their families had been given the opportunity to visit the victims shortly before the execution on Thursday.
Spiritual advisers were tasked with providing comfort and guidance to prisoners in their final hours before facing the firing squad.
All 14 had been moved into isolation cells ahead of the executions. It “has some of the world’s toughest drug laws”, says BBC News, “and has faced intense criticism internationally for resuming executions”.
The president’s office often 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.
Its all-out war on illegal drugs has already seen a large number of executions in recent years.
Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif’sefforts helped suspend the death penalty of Pakistani prisoner in Indonesia, accused for drug smuggling, Maryam Nawaz said.
Those executed on Friday have been named as Indonesian Freddy Budiman and Nigerians Seck Osmane, Humphrey Jefferson Ejike and Michael Titus Igweh.
Four of these had been arrested on a fake passport, causing confusion in Indonesia as to their true nationality.
Widodo’s two-year-old administration will have executed more people than were executed in the previous decade.
Amnesty International condemned the executions as a “deplorable act” that violated local and international law.
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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.
