Dead Bodies Of Indonesian Drug Convicts Finally Laid To Rest [Photos]

Indonesia brushed aside last-minute appeals yesterday and executed eight people including 4 Nigerians convicted of drug smuggling in their country. Photos of the dead being buried and details from their last minutes on earth have now been revealed.

According to the pastors who were with them in their final hours, reformed Bali Nine ringleaders Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran and their six fellow death row prisoners refused to wear blindfolds and were singing as they were executed by a 13-member firing squad in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The eight men chose to face their executioners and spent their last minutes of life praying, praising God and singing songs including Amazing Grace.

On Wednesday morning, Pastor Christie Buckingham - who read Chan and Sukumaran their last rites - said the eight death row inmates walked out onto the killing field singing religious songs in the
moments before they were executed.

Pastor Buckingham said the men conducted themselves with 'dignity and strength until the end'. Another pastor, Karina de Vega, said it was a 'beautiful experience'.

    'It was breathtaking. This was the first time I witnessed someone so excited to meet their God,' Pastor de Vega told Fairfax.

 Indonesian Attorney General Muhammad Prasetyo confirmed at a news conference hours after the deaths had been widely reported that each of the eight had been executed simultaneously at 12:35 a.m. (1735 GMT) by a 13-member firing squad. Medical teams confirmed their deaths three minutes later, he said.

    "The executions have been successfully implemented, perfectly. All worked, no misses," he said of the deaths of two Australians, four Nigerians, a Brazilian and an Indonesian man.

 Ambulances carrying the executed men's coffins have left the prison island of Nusakambangan, Death Island for burial.

Australians Sukumaran and Chan requested that their bodies be flown back to Australia. Nigerian Martin Anderson chose to be buried in the West Java town of Bekasi, and fellow Nigerian Raheem Agbaje, wanted to be buried in the East Java town of Madiun where he had been a prisoner. Indonesian Zainal Abidin is to be buried in Cilacap.

The wishes of two other Nigerians — Sylvester Obiekwe Nwolise and Okwudili Oyatanze — as well as those of Gularte, the Brazilian, have yet to be made public.

Originally, 10 inmates were to be executed, but Frenchman Serge Atlaoui was excluded because he still had an outstanding court appeal against Jokowi's rejection of his clemency application. The government says Atlaoui will face a firing squad alone if his appeal is rejected by the Administrative Court.

  The lady that was spared, Mary Jane Veloso's mother, Celia, said that the stay of execution for her daughter was nothing short of a miracle. Presidential spokesman Herminio Coloma thanked Indonesian President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo for giving due consideration to the appeal of his Philippine counterpart, Benigno Aquino III.

He said the reprieve provides an opportunity for her testimony to expose how a criminal syndicate duped her into being an unwitting accomplice and courier in drug trafficking.