Bali Nine bodies set for Australia

[Hydra]

Sukumaran, Chan remains return to Sydney

By Gabrielle Dunlevy
May 1, 2015, 8:29 pm

The bodies of Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan are expected to arrive in Sydney on Saturday.

They were moved from a Jakarta funeral home on Friday afternoon and were set to be flown home later the same night.

Some members of their grieving families have already returned to Australia, while some will return on Saturday morning with the bodies.

Sukumaran, 34, and Chan, 31, were executed in Indonesia on Wednesday, 10 years after their part in the Bali Nine heroin-smuggling plot.

Chan's brother Michael and mother Helen arrived back in Sydney ahead of the bodies on Friday.

The Sukumaran family is now preparing to make the same trip, leaving behind the ordeal that saw both families beg in vain for President Joko Widodo's mercy, right until the eve of the executions.

The pair's lawyer Julian McMahon says Sukumaran and Chan had both hoped the awareness around their deaths would spur action to end the death penalty worldwide.

In their final hours they were more concerned for others, he says, including their own families and the six prisoners who went to the firing squad with them.

Australia's ambassador to Indonesia, Paul Grigson, has been recalled to Canberra over the executions and will return over the weekend.

Indonesia's ambassador in Canberra, Nadjib Riphat Kesoema, meanwhile issued a statement extending his sympathies to the families on the day after the men were shot, in defiance of repeated pleas from the Australian government.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott viewed the statement as a sign decent people in Indonesia understood the upset the executions had caused.