الكاتب: kafej

East Java, Indonesia – Umar Patek was released from prison last December after serving just over half of a 20-year jail sentence for the Bali holiday island bombings in 2002, which killed 202 people. He was also convicted for a series of bomb attacks on Christian churches on Christmas Eve, 2000, that left 18 dead.

On the run for almost a decade, 57-year-old Patek from Central Java was arrested in 2011 in Abbottabad in Pakistan and extradited to Indonesia where he was found guilty of bomb making and murder the following year. The US State Department had offered a reward of $1m for any information leading to his capture.

Patek’s early prison release for good behaviour in 2022 was sharply criticised by Australian officials and the relatives of the hundreds of victims of the Bali bombing.

Al Jazeera recently interviewed Patek at his home in East Java where he spoke about his role in Bali and revealed that the horrific bomb attack two decades ago was an act of revenge for the violence inflicted on Palestinian people by Israeli forces.

He also talked about repentance and of being unsure whether God would forgive him for killing so many civilians.

Al Jazeera: How did you become involved with Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), the armed group behind the Bali Bombings? 

Umar Patek: In 1991, I was working in Malaysia and met Mukhlas [a senior JI figure who was sentenced to death and executed in 2008 for masterminding the Bali bombings] in Johor Bahru at the Lukman Hakim Islamic Boarding School.

I worked on a plantation in Malaysia, and would go to religious classes in the evening at the school. Then Mukhlas asked me to work at the school, so I moved in. After three months at the school, he offered me the chance to go to Pakistan. I wanted to study and he said I could study religion there.

I first went to Peshawar and then to Sadda, a tribal area in Pakistan which is close to the border with Afghanistan, where there was a military academy that trained people to be mujahideen [Islamic fighters]. From there I moved to a military academy in Torkham in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, I was in the same class as [Bali bomber] Ali Imron. In total, I was away for five years from 1991 to 1995.

We learned everything at the military academy to train us to be mujahideen, such as how to use weapons, map reading and bomb making. We practised blowing up bombs in areas where there were no people, like in caves or on hillsides, so that there would not be any fatalities.

We also wanted to make sure that no goats were accidentally killed because lots of people tend goats in Afghanistan.

 

When I finished my military training in 1995, I went to the Philippines to join the Moro Islamic Liberation Front because I supported their cause as a Muslim.

From 1995 to 2000, I lived at Camp Abubakar in the Bangsamoro region in the Philippines, but the camp was captured by the Philippine Army in July 2000 and I was told to leave because I looked like I came from the Middle East.

My family is originally from Yemen, although I am the fourth generation of my family to be born in Indonesia. My face didn’t look like the people in Moro.

In December 2000, I went back to Indonesia and stayed with Dulmatin [a JI member and one of the most wanted men in Southeast Asia who was nicknamed “the Genius” because of his expertise in electronics for bombs]. Dulmatin asked me to go to Jakarta for work. He had a job selling cars and he said I could also look for work there, which is how I became involved in the Christmas Eve church bombings.

AJ: You admitted to mixing the chemicals for the bombs used in the Bali bombing in 2002 and the Christmas Eve church bombings in 2000. But you also said you didn’t know what the bombs would be used for. Where did you think the bombs would be planted?

Patek: I did not mix the bombs for the church bombings, I only knew about the bombs at the time of delivery. It was Eid al-Fitr [the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan] and Dulmatin said, “Let’s go home to Pemalang for the holiday and drop off some things along the way.”

We kept stopping at churches, although I did not get out of the car. Every time we stopped at a church, I grew more suspicious that we were dropping off bombs because the packages were packed in laptop bags.

I was sentenced for the bombings even though I did not make the bombs or get out of the car because I was there and I didn’t do anything to stop it. Dulmatin then asked me to go on a trip to Bali in October 2002. We went into a house which was already full of bomb making equipment.

I met with [JI members] Imam Samudra, Mukhlas, Idris and Dr Azahari. Imam Samudra said that they wanted revenge for the occupation of Palestine and the attack on Jenin [by Israeli forces in 2002 which killed more than 50 Palestinians as well as 23 Israeli soldiers], so they wanted to bomb Westerners in nightclubs in Bali. He ushered me into one of the rooms in the house where all the ingredients to make the bombs had been prepared.

I told them, if we wanted to get revenge for the atrocities committed against Muslims in Palestine, we should go to Palestine and not kill Westerners in Indonesia. I asked them, “What is the relationship between these people who will be victims and your motive of revenge for Muslims in Palestine?”

I told them that if they wanted to kill Westerners in large numbers using a one-tonne bomb, it would not just kill the people in front of it. It would explode everywhere. I told them that it would kill lots of other people who were not their target.

I said that a bomb would also likely cause Muslim casualties. I asked them, “Who will take responsibility in the next world [paradise] if there are Muslim victims because of this bomb?”

Imam Samudra said that, on the day of judgement, everyone would be judged individually for their actions based on their intentions.

I felt that there was no way I could refuse. Imam Samudra had locked the front door of the house so that no one could leave.

So I did it, and made the last 50kg [110lbs] of the bomb.

AJ: More than 200 people died in Bali as a result of the bomb you helped to make. How do you feel about killing so many people?

Patek: I felt guilty when I mixed the materials for the bomb and I felt I was sinning. I felt I was breaking Indonesian law but, more than that, I felt it was a sin against God.

AJ: Do you consider yourself to be a mass murderer?

Patek: Yes. I feel that I am a murderer and a sinner.

I have apologised to the victims of the Bali bombing several times and met with the families of the victims of the bombing, too. I told them I was sorry. Everyone who has met with me in person has forgiven me. When I meet victims, I say, “I am Umar Patek and I was involved in the Bali bombing,” then I explain why I was there, and apologise.

Some people don’t want to meet me and don’t want to forgive me, like people from Australia. That is their right, but my responsibility as a Muslim, and someone who has done wrong, is to apologise. I don’t know if I will be forgiven, only God knows that.

I did not say sorry to get out of prison early, but everything is always wrong in other people’s eyes. If I say sorry, people say I am pretending and it is a strategic choice. If I didn’t apologise, people would say I was arrogant.

AJ: Did you agree with the 20-year prison sentence that you were given?

Patek: I accepted it at the time. There is nothing fair in this life on Earth, justice will only come in the hereafter.

AJ: Your release from prison was highly controversial, particularly in Australia, as you only served 11 years of your 20-year sentence. Should you have been freed?

Patek: I fulfilled all the criteria according to Indonesian law to qualify for release in 2022. I had also been very opposed to the idea of the Bali bombing from the beginning. The witnesses at my trial all said the same, which is why I was sentenced to 20 years in prison [only]. The central people in the Bali bombing were sentenced to death or died in other ways like Dulmatin, who was shot by the police.

I last saw him in June 2009, when I came home from the Philippines to Jakarta. He asked me to go to a JI military academy in Aceh, but I said I didn’t want to. I had had enough. I told him I was just transiting in Indonesia to get my passport and visa to go to Afghanistan. I wanted to live there for the rest of my life and I asked him to come with me, but he refused.

He [Dulmatin] was shot in Pemulang in Tangerang [a city on the outskirts of Jakarta]. I wondered if he had repented for his sins before he died. I never heard him say he felt remorse or sadness about the victims of the Bali bombing and about people who were not the target of the bombing. He never said anything about that and never asked for forgiveness.

So I was sad for him.

AJ: Is the killing of civilians ever justified?

Patek: When I was in the Philippines with the [Moro front], I lived with [the chairman] Salamat Hashim and he would often preach to us. He strongly forbade mujahideen from attacking civilians, not just Muslims but also Christians. He said that that was not allowed, and that only members of the army, or civilians who were fighting with the army, and who were also carrying weapons, were allowed to be attacked.

He once said to me, “Why do you want to wage jihad in Indonesia, who do you want to fight there? The president is Muslim, the government is Muslim, the People’s Representative Council is mainly Muslim, lots of police are Muslim, the army is full of Muslims. It is haram [forbidden] to attack them because attacking Muslims is not allowed.”

He felt that it was not right to attack people in Indonesia, and I said that at the time of the Bali bombing, but no one wanted to listen to me.

AJ: What are your thoughts on the Israel-Gaza war?

Patek: In the opening section of the 1945 Indonesian Constitution, it says that “all colonialism must be abolished in this world”.

Occupation anywhere, not just in Palestine, is not allowed.

It is Hamas’s right to take back their land. The news that they are killing babies and children is a hoax perpetrated by the Western media. Indonesia used to be occupied by the Dutch colonialists. Would you call Indonesian heroes, who fought for their independence, terrorists? The Dutch would call them terrorists, but they were just taking back their land.

AJ: Are you deradicalised now?

Patek: What is radicalised? If a Christian wants to follow their religion according to the teachings of the Bible, would we call them radicalised?

I feel that the media has a false image of me as someone who is frightening and cruel. They always paint me as someone who is dangerous.

People often ask me why I don’t want to be a terrorist any more and why I am so cooperative. I also say that it is from my family. They are the ones who melted my heart and set me back to the right path.

I am the oldest of three brothers. All my family members are moderate Muslims, none of them have ever followed the same ideology I used to follow, and they have often confronted me about it over the years.

If my family had said they did not want to have anything more to do with me because of my old ideology, perhaps I would still be radical in my thinking, but fortunately they embraced me and that allowed me to change.

AJ: How do you feel about non-Muslims?

Patek: When I was a child growing up, all my neighbours were Chinese Christians. I always used to play with them. Since I was young, I have always been around non-Muslims.

I don’t hate Christians. My wife’s extended family are Christians and, when we got married, we had no problems and took photos together on our wedding day.

When I married my wife, I invited all of her family to the wedding at Camp Abubakar. In the beginning, they didn’t want to come because they were worried we would cut their heads off. I told them that the mujahideen did not harm civilians, and that we only attacked the police and the army. I said that I guaranteed their safety.

In the Moro tradition, when someone got married, mujahideen would shoot their weapons in the air to celebrate. But because my wife’s Christian family was there, I told my fellow mujahideen, “Don’t do the traditional celebration because we have Christians coming and it will scare them.

“They will think we are trying to kill them.”

Protests at shipping ports and a unique court case are bringing attention to Australian weapons exports to Israel amid the war on Gaza, a trade that critics describe as secretive and unaccountable.

“Few people know that Australia has one of the most secretive, unaccountable weapons export systems in the world,” Australian Greens Senator David Shoebridge told the Australian Senate on Tuesday.

A legal challenge launched in Australia’s high court on Monday by Palestinian and Australian human rights organisations is also seeking to shed light on the shadowy trade.

The case, which is a first of its kind in Australia, comes as Australian supporters of Palestine have joined the international “block the boat” movement to protest against arms shipments to Israel.

A protest at Sydney’s Port Botany expected on Saturday followed a similar protest at the Port of Melbourne on Wednesday where activists lay down in front of trucks carrying cargo for the Israeli shipping company Zim.

But determining whether shipments from Australia do, in fact, include weapons that are being sent to Israel is difficult due to a general lack of transparency around Australia’s growing military export industry.

“Our government doesn’t tell us who we’re exporting weapons to; doesn’t tell us what the weapons are; doesn’t tell us who profits here in Australia from the sale of weapons,” Shoebridge said in the Senate this week.

The Australian government approves hundreds of military sales to Israel and we have no idea what the weapons are or how they are used. Even the US has more transparency on weapons sales than Australia. Time to tell the truth. pic.twitter.com/26FED23AvM

— David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) November 7, 2023

 

Shoebridge said such information is much less available in Australia than in other countries, including the United States.

What is known is that Australia has issued 350 defence export permits to Israel since 2017, including 52 this year alone, according to the Australian Department of Defence. That information was only made publicly available after direct questions from Shoebridge during Senate hearings this year.

‘A large and growing arms industry’

Antony Loewenstein, an Australian journalist and author of the book, The Palestine Laboratory, said there is “damning evidence” that Western states, including Australia, have been selling weapons that are “potentially being used in Gaza as we speak”.

Loewenstein, who was based in East Jerusalem between 2016 and 2020, has investigated how Israeli weaponry and surveillance technology is used on Palestinians and exported around the world.

“There is bipartisan support [from major political parties] in Australia for a large and growing arms industry, regardless of the serious human rights concerns around that,” Loewenstein said.

“Secrecy benefits the arms industry”, he told Al Jazeera.

“What matters ultimately is making money,” he said.

“That’s all it’s about.”

Australia was the 15th largest exporter of major arms globally in 2022, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) which monitors global arms sales.

Like Shoebridge, Loewenstein has welcomed the legal challenge announced by Palestinian and Australian human rights organisations on Monday. He says it could be a “landmark case” that the Australian government will likely “fight furiously” in the courts.

Al-Haq, one of the three Palestinian human rights organisations involved in the court case, is also involved in other legal challenges, including another potential case focused on arms exports by the United Kingdom to Israel.

Last month Al-Haq and the UK-based Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) wrote to the UK Secretary of State for International Trade, Kemi Badenoch, asking her to “suspend all weapons export licences to Israel”.

If the export licences were not suspended, Al-Haq and GLAN said a judicial review challenge would be brought before the UK High Court.

In Australia, Al-Haq, along with the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), has launched legal action in the Federal Court of Australia with the support of the Australian Centre for International Justice (ACIJ).

Unlike in the UK, the Australian case is focused on accessing information about Australian defence export permits to Israel that have been granted by the Minister for Defence since October 7, 2023.

Rawan Arraf, the executive director of ACIJ, told Al Jazeera that access to the export information is required in order to establish if it will be possible to launch proceedings to seek a judicial review of Australian permits to determine if any have been “made in error”.

Such errors, Arraf says, could, for example, include whether Australia’s “Minister for Defence failed to consider criteria relevant to the risk that the export would be used to facilitate human rights abuses or may go to a country where they may be used contrary to Australia’s international obligations”.

The international obligations include the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention and other international human rights law, she said.

In the UK, information pertaining to companies that are making requests for export permits, as well as the nature of the exports, and “even the dollar amount”, is available, she added.

Asked about the legal action, Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles told the Australian public broadcaster ABC on Tuesday that “Israel has not sought any weapons from Australia and we have not provided any”.

He added that he could not comment further while the matter was “before the court”.

Marles’s office sent a transcript of the interview to Al Jazeera when asked for the defence minister’s position on the case.

Port protests

Australian activists who protested at the Port of Melbourne on Wednesday stopped trucks, including those carrying cargo for the Israeli shipping company Zim.

The protests join other similar protests including one at the Port of Tacoma in the US and airport workers in Belgium who are refusing to handle military shipments to Israel.

Zim is a publicly listed Israeli shipping line, and it is not clear if any of the ships or trucks targeted by Australian protests have been carrying military equipment.

Organisers of the Sydney protest claimed Zim’s role “in the Israeli war machine, has been relentless”.

In an interview with Australian radio station 2GB about a protest planned at Sydney’s Port Botany on Saturday, the Premier of NSW Chris Minns described Israel as “a longstanding trading partner and ally of Australia”.

“It’s ridiculous to suggest or think that trade will be stopped because of the personal preferences of individual protesters,” he said.

“I didn’t see these people down the port when it comes to trading with Cuba, or Saudi Arabia or China or any other country there may be disagreements with,” Minns added.

The third Republican debate of the 2024 United States presidential race came and went this week with a whimper.

The New York Times dismissed the event as “the undercard that underwhelmed”. The Washington Post cast it as “a lower-tier competition”. And The New Yorker brushed it aside as “an incredible waste of time for any but the most masochistic of Republican viewers”.

What prompted the withering criticism was the seeming insignificance of a debate without the Republican Party’s heaviest hitter, former President Donald Trump.

Now one year into his 2024 reelection campaign, Trump remains far and away the party frontrunner, trouncing his Republican rivals in seemingly every poll. Confident in his lead, he has skipped every Republican debate so far this election season.

Experts say this creates a novel dynamic: one where Trump is acting more like an incumbent than a candidate trying to unseat a sitting president.

“What’s unusual about this is there’s a former president, not a sitting president, who is dominating the field and skipping debates,” said Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institute and author of the book Primary Politics.

Above the fray

Traditionally, in the US, the incumbent’s party never holds primary debates, even if other candidates from the same party enter the fray.

That is the case with current President Joe Biden. Though he faces Democratic challenges from long-shot candidates like Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips, he will not have to confront them on the debate stage.

The decision is largely a practical one. Incumbents have name recognition and a track record of success at the ballot box — and public spats within a party could dent the prospect of a repeat victory.

Where primary debates come in handy, however, is in establishing a frontrunner among challengers from the opposing party. But Trump, with his commanding grip on the Republican base, has eschewed mixing in with the rest of the Republican field.

Lynn Vavreck, an American politics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, indicated that choice was strategic.

“If he were to go to the debates, he would be reinforcing the idea that, in some way, these people are the same as him,” she told Al Jazeera.

A signature tactic

Vavreck pointed out that Trump was relying on some of the same tactics he used when he himself was an incumbent in 2020.

Trump has a long history of undercutting opponents through counter-programming, a technique common in the television industry. It involves drawing viewers away from a given event by offering competing attractions.

A former TV star himself, Trump made heavy use of counter-programming when he was seeking reelection while in office.

At the time, a broad field of Democrats were vying to unseat him, and Trump invested heavily in YouTube ads set to coincide with their first primary debate. One expert at the time told the publication Vox that he anticipated Trump’s ads would generate twice the viewership.

“It’s very on-brand for him. He likes to be the star of the show,” Vavreck said of Trump’s counter-programming playbook. “One way to make sure you get attention is to do something totally different.”

Trump has continued to use counter-programming against his own party’s debate schedule. On Wednesday, while the third Republican debate unfolded on stage in Miami, Florida, Trump was a mere 20 minutes away in the Cuban American stronghold of Hialeah, holding a rally.

“The last debate was the lowest-rated debate in the history of politics,” Trump said in his speech. “So, therefore, do you think we did the right thing by not participating?” The crowd responded with cheers.

Sowing doubt over 2020 loss

Vavreck added that Trump’s status as a former president gives him much of the same stature and sway as an incumbent — and that puts his rivals in a “tough spot”.

“They’re trying to navigate this unusual situation,” she said.

Little has dimmed Trump’s leadership over the Republican Party, despite his bitter defeat in 2020, a loss that rendered him only the 10th single-term president to not win reelection.

Trump has maintained — falsely — that the race was “stolen” from him through voter fraud. And though he faces 91 felony charges in four separate criminal cases, he has reframed his legal woes as evidence of a Democratic conspiracy, an argument that has galvanised his base.

“Within his own party, Trump remains strong, and right now, nobody else is anywhere close,” said Quinnipiac University polling analyst Tim Malloy. “Trump so far has been impervious to the indictments he’s faced.”

A September poll from Malloy’s firm showed 62 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters supporting Trump, up from 57 percent support in August.

Malloy said there are currently no Republican contenders that could overtake Trump. Even household names like former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis remain distant prospects, more or less tied for second place.

“We’ve watched DeSantis go down pretty dramatically, Nikki Haley closing in on DeSantis,” Malloy explained. But, he added, none of that changes the fact that “at the moment, Trump is the prohibitive favourite”.

Potential for a primary shakeup?

Still, at Wednesday’s debate, the five leading Republican contenders behind Trump took modest jabs at the former president, hoping to chip away at his lead.

“I think he was the right president at the right time,” Haley, a former member of Trump’s administration, said from the primetime stage. “I don’t think he’s the right president now.”

Meanwhile, DeSantis said Trump should appear at the debates: “He owes it to you to be on this stage and explain why he should get another chance.”

Primary debates have been a US tradition since 1948. But even with Trump boycotting the debates, the experts Al Jazeera spoke to said the primary races themselves could yield unexpected outcomes. They decide who ultimately receives the party nomination.

“If somebody gets in second place, it’s very possible that the second-place winner could turn out to be someone who challenges him all the way down the road,” Primary Politics author Kamarck said.

She pointed out that the better-known candidate in the 2008 Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton, ended up being left in the dust by dark horse Barack Obama.

Vavreck, the politics professor, said the upcoming primary races — starting in January with the Iowa caucus — may create an opening for one of Trump’s Republican rivals.

“If any one of those other candidates does significantly better than they’re expected to, history tells us — the data from the past tells us — that they will pick up momentum and it could become a contest,” Vavreck said.

But even she acknowledged that, for now, Trump’s grip on the party nomination seems ironclad. “It still seems highly unlikely that Trump doesn’t come out ahead in the end.”

Warsaw, Poland – Thousands are expected to join a nationalistic march in Poland’s capital Warsaw on Saturday, in what organisers describe as the “largest patriotic demonstration in Europe”.

In recent years, the annual Independence March has attracted up to 250,000 participants.

But this year, experts and participants expect a lower turnout, amid internal splits between leaders of the rally and after the Confederation Party, which is traditionally allied with the event, suffered a spectacular electoral defeat last month.

First organised in 2010 to commemorate Poland’s Independence Day, the march usually attracts right-wing, conservative and neo-fascist groups from across Europe and the United States.

It traditionally takes place against the backdrop of racist, xenophobic and anti-liberal chants.

Saturday’s march will begin at 2pm local time.

“It seems that the march will be much smaller and less visible,” Przemyslaw Witkowski, adjunct professor at Collegium Civitas and a researcher of political extremism, told Al Jazeera. “There is also a smaller number of people who signed up for the so-called March Guard – a group of volunteers operating, protecting, and controlling the event.”

But at the same time, smaller numbers could see more “radical” and violent forces at play, he said.

“Once there is a new, more left-wing government in place, we will face a much greater tension, which we might be able to feel even this year when the march still has a status of an annual event,” Witkowski said. “This decision might be reversed next year, and once the march is faced with registration issues, we can surely expect more violence.”

This year’s slogan, “Poland has not yet perished”, refers to the opening lyrics of the national anthem, which are then followed by “as long as we live”.

The song, written in 1797 when Poland was off the world’s map, was meant to raise the morale of the Polish Legions fighting alongside Napoleon in Italy. It conveyed the message that despite lacking a state of its own, the Polish nation had endured a struggle for independence.

Poland’s situation could not be more different from the one described in the song.

However, many on the political right believe that the results of the recent parliamentary election, in which the coalition of the liberal Civic Platform, conservative Third Way, and left-wing Lewica came out as winners, will lead to the gradual erosion of the country’s independence.

Traditionally pro-European and advocating for stronger European integration, liberal political forces are viewed with increased suspicion by the right including the Confederation Party, which was widely expected to score between 12-14 percent of the vote. It ended up with 8.6 percent.

“We can expect – with a high probability – a change in EU treaties, which will affect Poland’s sovereignty and Poland’s independence in the international arena, and in particular within the [European Union],” Bartosz Malewski, head of the Independence March association, told reporters in October.

“This slogan also expresses our position on the need to emphasise sovereignty and the threat to sovereignty.”

Other march participants agree.

Grzegorz Cwik, from the nationalist Niklot association, told Al Jazeera, said he fears the “federalisation of the European Union, cuts of military spending, and dismantling of social programmes”.

So far, the winning coalition has not built a government, but the recent election results are not the only challenges faced by the march organisers.

The former head of the Independence March association, Robert Bakiewicz, over the years moved closer towards Law and Justice, the former ruling nationalist party, and was widely seen as using the event for his own political gains.

Many march-goers also accused him of making the demonstration too mainstream and of fighting against radical nationalists, who in fact are the event’s founders.

“I think that for the past few years, the march’s formula was unfortunately more picnic-like, and hooligans, for example, stopped attending it,” Cwik said.

Eventually, a dispute between Bakiewicz and the march’s leadership close to Confederation’s circles led to a public exchange of accusations and the removal of Bakiewicz from his post.

Bakiewicz was also accused of keeping passwords to the Independence March’s social media accounts, effectively blocking the new leadership’s access to well-followed fan pages.

It is unlikely that he will show up at the march.

A man who spent 35 years behind bars in the US after being wrongly convicted of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl has been freed from prison thanks to a DNA breakthrough.

Louis Wright, now aged 65, had lived near the child’s home in Albion, Michigan, at the time of the attack in 1988 and an off-duty officer reported seeing him about five hours before the incident.

That year, Mr Wright was sentenced to 25-50 years for various sexual assault charges, and 6-15 years for breaking and entering.

Earlier this year, however, the Michigan Department of the Attorney General’s Conviction Integrity Unit was told that items from the case were found by the Albion Department of Public Safety.

The items were sent for testing and came back with “foreign male DNA”.

As a result of this, Mr Wright was excluded as the perpetrator, resulting in his charges being set aside, officials said.

On 18 January 1988, a perpetrator broke into the girl’s home while she was asleep and forced her into the living room where he assaulted her.

Later that day, Mr Wright voluntarily went to the local police department.

Officers said he confessed, though the interview was not recorded and he did not sign a confession, according to the Cooley Law School Innocence Project which represents Mr Wright.

But the girl was never asked to take part in any identification process, or identify anyone in court.

Mr Wright pleaded no contest to the charges – which is treated as a guilty plea for sentencing purposes.

He then tried to withdraw his plea and claimed he was innocent.

Over decades in prison, Mr Wright has consistently maintained his innocence and it is unclear why he pleaded no contest in the first place.

Prosecutor David Gilbert said the case is being reopened.

“There is no justice without truth. It applies to everyone,” he said.

Mr Wright could be eligible for a $1.75m (£1.43m) payout under a state law that grants $50,000 (£40,900) for each year spent in prison for a conviction overturned based on new evidence.