Islamic militants in Indonesia are competing for the right to build a shrine to the Bali bombers, amid indications that their long-anticipated execution by firing squad is imminent.

Five separate people have offered to create a joint grave for Ali Amrozi bin Haji Nurhasyim, Ali Ghufron and Imam Samudra, the three men who were sentenced to death for the October 2002 Bali attacks.

According to a lawyer for the three men, their families will decide which of the offers to accept when the date of the executions has been set — which could be as early as Friday this week.

One of those bidding for the Bali bombers’ remains is Cecep Hermawan, leader of a group of Islamic fundamentalists, who has offered a hectare of land in the city of Cianjur in West Java. He told the Sydney Morning Herald that he regards the Bali bombers as martyrs and wants to enable pilgrims to pay their respects at their graves.

“The families said they are OK with that,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “Their only complaint is about the distance, especially for the families of Amrozi and Mukhlas [a nickname of Ali Ghufron] because they live in East Java. The family of Imam Samudra has no problem as it is not far from their home town.” Mr Cecep, who regularly visits the three bombers, described them as men “who fought for the existence of Islamic sharia, [and who] paid with their life”.

Two hundred and two people, including 24 Britons, died in the three explosions in the resort town of Kuta six years ago this month. They were carried out by an Indonesian cell of a southeast Asian militant group known as Jemaah Islamiyah.

The Bali bomb plot is said to have been masterminded by JI’s “operations director “, Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali. Spiritual support was supplied by Abu Bakar Bashir, who was convicted on several charges connected to the bombings but released in 2005 after only two years in jail.

Mr Bashir insists that the three men sentenced to death for the Bali bombings were framed by the true culprit for the attack, the US Central Intelligence Agency, which caused the explosions with a “micro-nuclear bomb” as part of an American, Australian and Jewish conspiracy. “They will die as martyrs and if someone dies as a martyr he will get special treatment in the afterlife,” he said recently.

The three bombers were sentenced to death in 2003 and have never seriously contested the ruling. But their executions have been delayed, apparently because of reluctance by the Indonesian Government to killing men regarded as heroes by a small, but vocal, minority of Indonesians.

The Government has said that they will be carried out by the end of this year and the office of the Attorney-General promised an announcement this week that would specify at least the month of the executions.

Two years ago it was revealed that Imam Samudra raised funds for a second attack on Bali via an Internet connection from his death row cell. He communicated with a number of extremists, one of whom created a website setting out the best ways of assassinating foreigners. In 2004, he managed to publish an autobiography from jail, in which he described how to perpetrate credit card fraud as a means of funding terrorist attacks.

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