A court on the Indonesian resort island of Bali has convicted three Australian citizens in the shooting death of an Australian citizen after they claimed to have received a payment from a man they will not identify.
Mevlut Coskun, Paea I Middlemore Tupou and Darcy Jenson were convicted of the shooting death of Zivan Radmanovic, a 32-year-old Melbourne man.
A second man, Sanar Ghanim, 34, was shot and beaten, but survived the attack.
Coskun, 22, and Tupou, 27, were sentenced in Denpasar District Court to 16 years in prison and Jenson, 24, was sentenced to 12 years.
Coskun and Tupou argued that the June 2025 shooting death was unintentional and occurred during the chaos of the night.
Radmanovic was in Bali to celebrate the birthday of his wife, Jazmyn Gourdeas, along with his sister and Ghanim, who was his sister’s partner.
A coroner determined Radmanovic had suffered three gunshot wounds and blunt force trauma.
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Prosecutors said Jenson had organized the attack while the other two carried it out.
Jenson was caught at Jakarta’s Soekarno Hatta airport in June while trying to leave the country. Coskun and Tupou were arrested in Singapore and Cambodia with the help of Interpol.
During the trial that began in October, the three men said they had been offered money to travel to Bali and scare Ghanim into paying a debt.
They said the offer came from an Australian man whom they declined to identify because they feared for the safety of their families.
Investigators testified that the group had received instructions from a “Mr. X” whose identity was never determined.
The court accepted that the men had acted in exchange for “a promised payment”.
Prosecutors asked the court to sentence Coskun and Tupou to 18 years in prison and Jenson to 17 years.
While the three-judge panel said the defendants had caused “profound trauma” to the families of the two victims, presiding judge Wayan Suarta noted that the defendants had no criminal record and had cooperated throughout the investigation and trial.
“They are still young and have the opportunity to improve in the future,” he stated, stressing that the punishment “is not intended to be revenge, nor to degrade their dignity, but rather a preventive measure so that similar events do not occur again.”
