Court jails three Australians over Bali shooting death
A court on the Indonesian resort island of Bali has convicted three Australian citizens over the fatal shooting of an Australian citizen after they claimed they were paid by a man they did not identify.
Mevlüt Coşkun, Paea I Middlemore Tupou and Darcy Jenson were found guilty of shooting and killing 32-year-old Zivan Radmanovic from Melbourne.
A second man, 34-year-old Sanar Ghanim, was shot and beaten but survived the attack.
In the Denpasar District Court, 22-year-old Coşkun and 27-year-old Tupou were sentenced to 16 years in prison each, and 24-year-old Jenson was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Coşkun and Tupou argued that the armed attack was not intentional and occurred during the chaos of the night.
Radmanovic was in Bali with his sister and her sister’s partner Ghanim to celebrate his wife Jazmyn Gourdeas’ birthday.
The medical examiner found that Radmanovic suffered three gunshot wounds and blunt force trauma.
Prosecutors said Jenson organized the attack and two others carried it out.
Jenson was captured at Jakarta’s Soekarno Hatta airport in June while trying to leave the country.
Coşkun and Tupou were arrested in Singapore and Cambodia with the help of Interpol.
During the trial, which began in October, the three men said they were offered money to go to Bali and intimidate Ghanim into paying off his debt.
They said the offer came from an Australian man whom they refused to identify out of fear for their family’s safety.
Investigators testified that the group received instructions from a “Mr.
The court accepted that the men acted in exchange for “promised payment”.
Prosecutors had asked the court to sentence Coşkun and Tupou to 18 years in prison and Jenson to 17 years in prison.
The three-judge panel said the defendants caused “deep trauma” to the families of the two victims, while Presiding Judge Wayan Suarta noted that the defendants had no prior criminal records and cooperated throughout the investigation and trial.
“They are still young and have the chance to improve themselves in the future,” he said, stressing that punishment “is not intended as revenge, nor to degrade their dignity, but as a preventive measure so similar acts do not occur again”.
