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Bali Nine pair appeal, but it won’t stop executions

Indonesia’s attorney-general says the applications for a judicial review filed by two Australian drug smugglers on death row will not prevent them being executed.

Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were sentenced to death for their part in organising the 2005 Bali Nine heroin trafficking attempt.

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Today the pair filed requests for reviews of their death sentences, after they were denied presidential pardons.

But attorney-general Muhammad Prasetyo said that would not stop the Bali Nine ringleaders being executed.

He said an agreement between government departments and the courts meant their application for a review should be rejected anyway.

Chan and Sukumaran are among a group of drug smugglers who could face a firing squad within weeks.

The men have exhausted all legal avenues for appeal and a judicial review at the supreme court level failed to overturn their sentences.

On Wednesday, Indonesian president Joko Widodo said he would not grant clemency to the two men.

Chan and Sukumaran’s application for a judicial review came after the grandmother of Sukumaran made a desperate plea at a vigil in Sydney, urging president Joko Widodo to intervene to save his life.

“I don’t ask him to come home. I only ask him to give him life and let him do something in the prison,” she said.

“Don’t kill him, please don’t kill him.”

The two Australians have been in jail in Indonesia since 2005 after they were arrested with seven others while trying to smuggle heroin out of Bali.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has made a public appeal for the men’s lives.

He said the men “deserve mercy” and were “reformed characters”.

Earlier this month, six people were executed after being denied clemency a month earlier and given three days’ notice of their deaths.

A high ranking official from the attorney-general’s office said no decision had been made about who on death row would be executed next.

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