AS our Jeep rocked along a jungle track towards the maximum-security prison housing the Bali bombers, we passed a group of bored-looking men in fatigues sitting around outside a hut in the noonday heat.

“The firing squad,” said the defence lawyer Achmad Michdan in a matter-of-fact tone. “They’ve been here for two months now.”

The families and friends of the three prisoners awaiting execution were with us, and they too drove past the men, who stared at the convoy of vehicles.

On the prison island south of Java all felt surreal: first the journey on a dilapidated ferry to a penal colony rising out of snake-infested swamps; on to the white walls and silvery barbed wire of the jail, a permit check, a search; then a steel door opened and we went into a room where the condemned men waited for us.

Imam Samudra, 38, was the planner who chose the targets in Bali and organised two suicide bombers to carry out the attack. He wore a fine blue robe, leading his three young children around by the hand and chatting to his wife and his mother, both veiled.

Ali Ghufron, better known as Mukhlas, 48, was the financier who once met Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan while making his own pilgrimage from theologian to jihadist. He sat crosslegged on the floor, lecturing to his friends.

Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, 46, dubbed “the smiling bomber”, was the village mechanic who bought the explosives and the Mitsubishi van used as a car bomb. He rose from the floor, kissed me on both cheeks and said, “Salaam aleikum [peace be upon you],” with a cheery grin.

There were 202 people killed on the night of Saturday, October 12, 2002, when the crime planned by these men was carried out on the peaceful, mainly Hindu holiday island of Bali.

The first suicide bomber walked into Paddy’s Bar and set off a bomb in the middle of a crowd of customers. The second bomber waited for people to flee into the street then detonated the Mitsubishi, packed with more than a ton of explosives, outside the Sari Club.

The victims were incinerated or flayed, died of shock or perished from burns and injuries later. They included 28 Britons.

For Australia, with 88 dead, it was a national tragedy, the greatest peacetime loss of life in the country’s history. It was a political and economic calamity for Indonesia, which lost 38 of its citizens, Muslims among them.

The three men in the room with us were caught, tried, convicted and sentenced to death. They said they had been stripped naked, beaten, given electric shocks and plunged into baths of water to make them talk.

Last week their lawyers won a judicial review of their case, though it is likely to fail. Their only hope after that is for clemency, but President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has hinted he will not grant it.

Thinking about all this I had little appetite for the chicken, spicy vegetables and rice we had brought from the mainland, which the bombers and their nearest and dearest were now eating with their hands.

“Are you a Muslim?” Samudra demanded in English, coming over to sit on the floor opposite me, a challenging look in his eyes. No, I replied.

“Are you a believer?” he asked. Yes, I said. Well then, he said, he would consent to talk if I truthfully reported all he said.

What of their legal case, I asked. “I am at the mercy of almighty Allah,” Samudra replied. “I don’t care.”

Did he deny the charges? “People called me the mastermind of the Bali bombing,” he said. “Maybe right, maybe wrong. My only mission was to help the Muslims.”

And then he said something extraordinary. He claimed the bombers had never meant to kill so many people. What happened at Paddy’s Bar and the Sari Club was “unacceptable”, he said.

Had he made the bomb? “No, no, no!” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t help to make it, and who made the bomb and when I don’t know.”

The second explosion was much bigger than they had expected, he said.

The only explanation, he suggested, was that “the CIA or KGB or Mossad” - those familiar bogeymen of the conspiracy theorist – had somehow tampered with the bomb. “It is very possible,” he claimed.

“I learnt about explosives in Afghanistan,” he continued. “As you know, I may be an expert.”

The truth may never be known. Investigators think the actual bomb-maker was a militant named Dulmatin. Police in the Philippines are conducting DNA tests on the body of a man killed in a gun battle with special forces on January 31, which informants say is Dulmatin’s.

Samudra’s fastidiousness about mass murder, which some scholars attribute to an element of Islamic theology, did not extend to any remorse. Two months before the bombing, he said, he had studied tourist literature to narrow down the list of targets.

Once on the scene, he said, “I observed Zionists. I knew they were using it [the bar] and then also I know I could spread this, with Australia, with Aussies.” No Israelis were killed in the attack.

His targets, he said, were “antiMuslims, especially people from the USA, Australia, members of Nato, elements of what people call the alliance because they know it’s a crusader army”.

What would he say to the families of his victims?

“To Muslim people I would say pardon - but Muslims only. While the unbelievers - they must be entering into hell. Allah says to all unbelievers that this road will bring you to hell,” he said.

Samudra denied that Bin Laden had paid for the bombing, saying, “The money came from other people.

“Some try to make a link between Al-Qaeda and us. Now I don’t know about this. We are not linked. The only link is iman [faith] and aqida [teachings],” he added.

Mukhlas, who prosecutors say raised the funds, also denied receiving money from Bin Laden, saying: “I collected it from supporters in Malaysia and Indonesia.”

For Samudra the bombing was a victorious act; not a suicide mission but a “martyrdom operation” in a war that, he says, is now being fought out on the internet - “the most important way to spread jihad”.

Samudra remains extremely dangerous. Police say that while in jail in Bali he used a smuggled laptop computer to communicate with militants to organise a second suicide attack in 2005 that killed 20 people.

“Your country, the United Kingdom, will lose of course because Allah says that only Muslims will win,” he said.

“I call you to Islam,” he said to me. “Islam is peace. Tomorrow belongs to Islam.”

It was almost a relief when Amrozi came over, sat down and squeezed my leg in a friendly manner. “My smile is my weapon,” he explained. “It makes my enemies upset. This is a very special weapon for jihad.”

Amrozi said he had read 500 books while in custody, mainly on Islam, and that he studied developments pointing to the imminent ruin of the United States, sometimes without any need of news media.

“I have received a sixth sense from Allah, which indicates to me one or two days in advance anything massive that may happen in the world,” he confided.

The reverie was broken by guards calling us out. Our time was up. The chicken and rice were all gone. The families gathered up their things. Between them the three condemned men have 13 children.

For British relatives of those who died in Bali, another difficult moment is approaching.

“I’d hoped it would be quietly sidelined and they’d be quietly left to rot in prison,” said Susanna Miller, whose brother Dan, aged 31 and married five weeks, was killed.

“They’re fanatics. What fanatics want is action and passion, and the worst thing you can do to a fanatic is to let them sit and get bored because then they might actually start to doubt themselves,” she added. “If you just rush them into an execution cell, you’re making them the martyr they want to be.”

Not all feel this way, however. “It’s about time they were executed,” said Sue Cooper, who lost her brother Paul Hussey. “I would pull the trigger myself.” That will not be necessary. If the judicial review fails and the president declines to grant clemency, the men in fatigues are waiting.

Additional reporting: Dewi Loveard in Jakarta, and Sara Hashash

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