JI expert Noor Huda Ismail, who studied at the Islamic boarding school under JI co-founder Abu Bakar Bashir, said the funeral service for brothers Amrozi and Mukhlas attracted group members from across Indonesia and Malaysia.

'That occasion unified these people to share contacts and for making strategies,' he told AFP after attending chaotic funerals of the bombers in the east Java village of Tenggulun on Sunday.

'This was an occasion for them to meet and we have to think of the possibilities' that they could use their time together to plot attacks.

He said he saw more than 20 JI militants among the 1,000-strong crowd in the normally sleepy coastal village, despite a heavy police presence designed to prevent violent protests.

The 2002 bombings of packed nightspots on the holiday island of Bali killed more than 200 people, mostly foreign tourists.

Several senior JI militants are believed to be at large in Indonesia, including Malaysian-born former accountant Noordin Mohammad Top and Singapore's most wanted terror suspect Mas Selamat Kastari, JI's leader in that state.

Another activist, Zulkarnaen, reportedly the Al-Qaeda pointman in South-east Asia, also remains on the run.

Their arrests would help decapitate the jihadi group, which has failed to stage a spectacular attack since a second set of bombings in Bali that killed 20 people in 2005.

Mr Sidney Jones, a terrorism analyst with the International Crisis Group in Jakarta, said the government's handling of the executions had increased the threat of reprisal attacks.

She joined other analysts in questioning the wisdom of allowing the bombers access to the Internet in their cells and their frequent interviews with the local and international media.

'If the government had denied the Bali bombers access to the media from the time they were first convicted, the risk (of violent retaliation to their executions) would have been lower than it is now,' she told The Jakarta Post.

'But Mukhlas and (other bomber) Imam Samudra in particular... used every possible opportunity to exhort their followers through interviews in the print and electronic media to avenge their deaths, in a way that may have made efforts at retaliation more likely.'

Under an editorial titled 'ood Riddance, The Jakarta Post newspaper levelled the same criticism at the government.

'Even on death row they continued to make news, obviously aided by the prison authorities... Only in Indonesia can a convicted terrorist awaiting execution become a media darling,' it said in an editorial on Monday.

At their final macabre press conference at a supposedly 'high-security' prison on October 1, the bombers once again parroted Osama bin Laden's world view of a militant Islam at war with the West.

In inflammatory comments likely picked up on Islamist websites and publications across the region, they promised to avenge their deaths.

'If I am executed, later there will be retribution,' the grinning Amrozi told foreign and international reporters gathered at the Nusakambangan island prison.

Denouncing the Indonesian authorities as 'satanic forces', his brother Mukhlas said: 'The people who will execute us, if they do this execution they will be cursed by God... they will be killing holy warriors.'

Reports in the Indonesian press Monday said Amrozi, a former mechanic seen as the least committed of the three bombers, was visibly terrified as he was led away to his death.

Asked at the press conference if he thought he'd be killed soon, he said: 'I don't feel that I will be executed. I never think about it.' -- AFP

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