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SNOWING IN BALI

Father Charles Burrows was to administer last rites, but in a cruel blow had been denied a letter of permission to go onto the island that night.

So, Marco was tied on the post, without his spiritual counsel, weeping, undoubtedly terrified, before twelve snipers aimed their guns at his heart and fired.

Another four prisoners were simultaneously executed; three men in nearby clearings – and a woman in central Java.

Marco will now ignobly go down in history as the first Westerner executed in Indonesia and the first Brazilian executed abroad.

‘Now you can fly home Curumim,’ one of his friends lamented after he was gone.

The night Marco was shot, I was in Bali. I alternated between watching the live coverage on local TV and standing on the balcony looking up at the night skies, which flashed with lightning and cracked with thunder. The ambience was fitting. Knowing Marco was being tied to a post and shot was chilling . . . and very surreal.

I first met Marco in 2008 at the super-maximum security prison on Nusakambangan Island, dubbed Indonesia’s Alcatraz. The sun-kissed tropical island is lush with an ugly scar of seven prisons slashed across it.

The most high-profile executions here before Marco were the Bali bombers. Muslim terrorists Amrozi, Samudra and Mukhlas murdered 202 people with bombs set in Kuta nightclubs in 2002. They were taken from their cells to a jungle clearing and shot dead in 2008.

Marco was locked up in a nearby cell. No doubt he heard the bullets; no doubt he was acutely aware he awaited the same fate.

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