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Heart and Soul: Crossing Divides: The bomber turned peacemaker

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Ali Fauzi Prison Gate

14/02/2020 GMT

The bomber turned peacemaker

Crossing Divides

BBC World Service - Heart and Soul, Crossing Divides, The bomber turned peacemaker

Ali Fauzi tries to stop people joining South East Asia's next wave of terror groups

Rebecca Henschke meets Ali Fauzi, a former bomb-maker who is trying to stop new recruits from joining the next wave of terror groups in South East Asia.

“I am an expert bomb maker. I can make bombs in just five minutes; it’s easier than making a kite.”

For Heart and Soul, Rebecca Henschke meets a bomber turned peacemaker as part of the Crossing Divides series on the BBC World Service.

Ali Fauzi was a chief bomb-maker for Jemaah Islamiyah, a terror group with links to Al-Qaeda, responsible for Indonesia’s worst terrorist attack – the Bali bombing in 2002. His brothers carried out the bombing. Two of the brothers were executed, while another is behind bars for life. 

Ali insists he was not involved in the Bali bombing, but spent three years in prison for terror-related offences. That was when his life took on a dramatically new direction. 
 
He is now on a mission to help former jihadis leave a life of violence, and to stop new recruits from joining the next wave of terror groups in South East Asia.
  
Produced and presented by Rebecca Henschke

Heart and Soul: Crossing Divides

Crossing Divides: Meeting the bombers who killed my mum

“I would wait and wait for my mum at the mosque….because my dad told me she had gone to God’s house”

Sarah, together with her father and brother, meets the bombers who killed her mother as she and her family attempt to understand how the men who carried it out could be followers of the same faith – and claim to carry out the act in the name of Islam.

On her 5th birthday Sarah’s mother died from injuries sustained in a terrorist attack.  She was the victim of a car bomb that exploded outside the Australian embassy in the Indonesian capital Jakarta in 2004.  

It was one of a series of bombings carried out by a local Islamist militant group Jemaah Islamiyah or J-I who were responsible for the country’s worst terrorist attack – the bombing on the holiday island of Bali in 2002 that killed more than 200 people. 

J-I members Rois and Ahmad Hassan are now on death row for their role in the bombing that killed Sarah’s mother. 

For Heart and Soul, in the first of two programmes as part of the Crossing Divides series on the BBC World Service, Rebecca Henschke witnesses the extraordinary meeting between Sarah and her mother’s killers on Indonesia’s highest security prison island. 

Presented and produced by Rebecca Henschke

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