The three Islamic militants convicted of the Bali bombings of 2002, in which 202 people including 24 Britons died, were executed by an Indonesian firing squad last night on a prison island south of Java.

Two military helicopters stood by to airlift the corpses to the men’s home villages, where their wives and 13 children awaited their funerals.

The executions went ahead after lawyers for the men exhausted all legal avenues for appeal and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono declined to grant clemency.

The men spent their last months in a maximum security jail on the prison colony of Nusa Kembangan, surrounded by snake-infested swamps.

Late last night they were led out through a thick steel door and past the white walls and barbed wire of the jail to three execution posts driven into the earth. A firing squad from the mobile brigade of the Indonesian police had been ready for months to carry out the sentences.

British relatives of the victims were sharply divided by last night’s executions.

Sue Cooper, 56, whose 46-year-old brother Paul Hussey died in the bombing, said: “I feel they should have been executed at the moment they were caught, and I’m sick of people who say that they don’t want them executed because they’ll become martyrs.”

Susanna Miller, 40, a London-based architect, lost her brother Dan, aged 31.

“The death penalty is an 18th-century punishment. My brother was a lawyer, he would have disapproved. Also, these men were low-level terrorists, the bigger ones are at large. They should have been given life sentences,” Miller said.

Maggie Stephens, 57, whose son Neil Bowler, 27, was killed, agreed. “By executing them we are doing to them what they did to us,” she said.

The condemned men were members of the southeast Asian group known as Jemaah Islamiah, which is seen as an ally of Al-Qaeda.

Imam Samudra, 38, was the planner who chose the targets and organised the two suicide bombers. Ali Ghufron, better know as Mukhlas, 48, was the financier, who met Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, 47, dubbed “the smiling bomber”, was the mechanic who bought the explosives and the Mitsubishi van used as a car bomb.

On the night of Saturday, October 12, 2002, on the holiday island of Bali the first suicide bomber walked into Paddy’s Bar and set off a bomb in the middle of an international crowd. The second bomber waited for people to flee outside and then detonated the van, packed with more than a ton of explosives, outside the Sari Club. The bombings were a political and economic calamity for Indonesia, too.

The bombers’ last formal interview was given to The Sunday Times at the prison in February. “I am at the mercy of almighty Allah,” declared Samudra. “My only mission was to help the Muslims.

“Some try to make a link between Al-Qaeda and us. We are not linked. The only link is faith and teachings.”

Additional reporting: Dewi Loveard in Jakarta and Abul Taher

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