INDONESIA: Abu Bakar Bashir cultivates the image of a frail if committed Islamic teacher. But many south-east Asian governments see the cleric as the leader of a group blamed for the deadliest bombings since the September 11th, 2001, strikes.
Yesterday, five Indonesian judges gave their view, saying the tall, bespectacled cleric was guilty of participating in acts of treason, but that prosecutors had failed to prove he was a leader of the militant Jemaah Islamiah (JI) group.
With that key part of the case rejected, the judges gave 65-year-old Bashir a sentence of four years rather than the 15 years prosecutors had demanded.
The public's verdict may be a different matter. When the charismatic Indonesian preacher was first detained on October 19th, a week after the Bali bombings that killed 202 people, large crowds gathered to protest against his detention.
But public support began to fade as police arrested suspect after suspect, most of them members of the shadowy JI group linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. There were few demonstrations during Bashir's trial. Even on the day of the verdict only a few hundred supporters turned up outside the court building.
Bashir has hailed bin Laden as the true Islamic warrior. He denies the existence of JI, says he had no knowledge of the Bali attacks, and had not been charged in connection with those bombings.
Prosecutors had instead accused him of links to a string of other bombings across the world's most populous Muslim nation, as well as a plot to assassinate Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri.
In his testimony Bashir refused to condemn several bombings - particularly the Christmas Eve 2000 church attacks that killed 19 people.
"If there is a Sharia reason, then from the religious point of view it is right, but not from the national law's point of view."
That testimony came hours before the apparent suicide bombing of the US-run Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, in which 11 people died. Throughout much of his trial, Bashir sat leafing through a copy of the Koran, apparently evincing scant interest in the proceedings. "I do not feel that I'm present in this trial," he once said.
He barely responded when Malaysian militant Faiz bin Abu Bakar Bafana, testifying by video from his cell in Singapore, called on him to admit he was JI's leader.
Bashir was jailed in 1979 for agitating to set up an Islamic state. In 1985 he escaped and fled to Malaysia, returning in 1999 when subversion laws were repealed.
He has described himself as a simple Islamic teacher, although he admits to encouraging Muslims to wage holy war if they believe Christians are attacking Muslims. - (Reuters)