Families head to Guantánamo Bay to seek justice in the Bali bombing

Frank Heffernan thought his daughter Megan was in South Korea, working as an English teacher, when he heard the news of a devastating terrorist attack on the Indonesian island of Bali on October 12, 2002.

Then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs called.

Megan Heffernan, 28, who was born and raised in Alaska and had a passion for travel, was one of 202 people killed in the coordinated bombings carried out by an Al Qaeda affiliate at a pub and a nearby club in Bali. She had been on holiday there with friends.

“There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about her,” Mr. Heffernan said, wiping his eyes with a tissue at his Florida home.

In the indiscriminate, brutal manner of terrorism, the bombings killed tourists and workers from 22 countries who happened to be in a commercial district, including 38 Indonesians. Among the dead were Australian and British citizens who were there for a rugby match, Americans with a passion for surfing – and Megan and two Korean friends, who were sightseeing when the bombs exploded.

Now, 20 years later, about a dozen family members who carry with them the memory of the largely forgotten attack are headed to another faraway place, Guantánamo Bay, in the U.S.-controlled part of Cuba. There they will represent the dead before a military jury charged with determining prison sentences for two Malaysian men who pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the bombings.

Among those making the trip are Mr. Heffernan and his wife, Bonnie K. Hall, whose own daughters knew Megan in Anchorage. Megan's mother, Sandra, died of the coronavirus three years ago. Mr Heffernan said he would reveal 'in court the true loss' of his daughter, 'a very thoughtful and religious girl who loved to travel'.

He said he trusts the court – the judge and military jury expected to convene next week – will decide on a fair verdict.

“We don't even know what the involvement of these two men is,” Ms. Hall said of the detainees, who have been held by the United States since 2003, first by the CIA and from 2006 at Guantánamo Bay.

In an interview, Mr Heffernan said he had not stopped to try to understand what was behind the attack.

“Whatever the depraved and twisted reasoning behind the bombing, whether it was because of governmental, religious or national differences, the bombing killed 202 people,” he wrote in his victim impact statement to the court.

It has left “everlasting sorrow for thousands of relatives and friends,” he added.

Prosecutors never proposed the death penalty in the three-defendant Bali bombing case, unlike the September 11 case at Guantanamo. Now, with this week's guilty pleas, only an Indonesian man known as Hambali will stand trial as the accused “operational mastermind” of the Jemaah Islamiyah movement, which carried out the bombing. That process could begin next year.

Mr. Heffernan said he became an opponent of the death penalty years ago after a visit to Vatican City, where he met Pope John Paul II. It was a kind of revelation, he said, that aligned him with “anti-death penalty theology.”

“Also, because I'm old, I realize that if you're given enough grace to live that long, you can look back and regret the things you've done,” he added.

Megan's favorite color was purple, and she preferred a T-shirt with the slogan: 'Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first,” Mr. Heffernan said. She would have turned 50 last month.

Since her death, Mr Heffernan has marked Megan's birthday, December 12, every year by donating a set of purple vestments for a priest to wear while celebrating Mass. Each robe has a small card commemorating his daughter.

Last year's donation has already been sent to Alaska, Ms. Hall said. “They will travel from village to village with a priest.”

By the time of her death, Megan Heffernan had skied in Argentina, taken a trip to Greece during high school and visited Ireland with her older brother Michael, younger sister Maureen and Maureen's husband. Their father paid for the trip, but did not go for fear he would spoil the fun.

“Children of a Heffernan father are the happiest children in the world,” said Mrs. Hall, who remembers writing to Megan every week with a pencil and No. 2 notebook after she moved to Busan, South Korea, to take English lessons to physicians, practicing physicians, in a postgraduate education program. Sometimes he sent care packages with Pringles, cookies and other favorites.

She traveled through Asia, to Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. She took riverboats from China to Vietnam, across the Mekong, and took a bus to Hanoi, her father said. He had visited some of those places during the Vietnam War, when he was an Army helicopter medevac pilot in 1967 and 1968 and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for his bravery. “She would go somewhere and then tell us,” Mr Heffernan said.

She had plenty of ideas about how she wanted to spend the rest of her life. She took pictures with a camera her father gave her. He thought she might want to be a photographer. She was beautiful enough to be a model, he said, and had the grace to perhaps become an actress. When she finished traveling, she wanted to buy a lodge in Alaska.

The State Department called within about a day of the bombings. Mr Heffernan heard his daughter was on holiday in Indonesia. Rescuers in Bali, thirteen time zones away, tried to identify the survivors, injured and missing.

The next call asked for Megan's dental records. It was then, he said, that he began praying for forgiveness for all the mistakes he made along the way in raising his eldest daughter.