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Heart and Soul: Crossing Divides: Meeting the bombers who killed my mum

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Sarah with Hassan and Rois

21/02/2020 GMT

Meeting the bombers who killed my mum

Crossing Divides

BBC World Service - Heart and Soul, Crossing Divides, Meeting the bombers who killed my mum

Sarah meets members of Jemaah Islamiyah responsible for a car bomb that killed her mum

Sarah, her brother and father meets two members of Jemaah Islamiyah, an Islamist militant group responsible for a car bomb that killed her mum in Jakarta in 2004.

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 fifth 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. 

Rebecca Henschke witnesses the extraordinary meeting between Sarah and her mother’s killers on Indonesia’s highest security prison island. 

Presenter/producer: Rebecca Henschke

Photo: Sarah (centre), Hassan (L) and Rois (R). Credit: Haryo Wirawan.

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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