Relatives of British victims of the Bali bombings said they plan to appeal the death sentence imposed on Indonesian Amrozi, saying it will make him a martyr and fuel more attacks.

In a statement on Thursday, the UK Bali Bombing Victims’ Group, representing 22 families of the 26 Britons killed in the 22 October attacks, said it welcomed Amrozi’s conviction.

“We are devastated he has been given a death sentence,”  it said. “We don’t want him to become a martyr. It is difficult to see how this sentence will achieve anything other than this.”

The group said Amrozi, convicted on Thursday of helping scheme and help carry out the attacks in two nightclubs that left 202 people killed, was only a “foot soldier” in a larger organisation. They will appeal through the British embassy in Jakarta.

“To paraphrase Gandhi, an eye for an eye will make the world blind,” it said.

Jun Hurst, whose boyfriend Daniel Braden was in Bali with his Taipei-based rugby side when he was killed, said: “He will…die a happy man, knowing that he has completed his mission,” she said. “His death will provoke more violence and more terror attacks.”

Braden’s father Alex Braden said: “ By sentencing Amrozi to death you create a martyr and more recruits.”

Susanna Miller, a spokesperson for the victims’ families, said they were furious with the Bali bombers but “it is just going to make the international situation worse if we’re going to have 30 martyrs”.

A foreign office spokeswoman said Britain was “pleased to see the due process of law has been gone through” in Indonesia, but could not say how London would react to the families’ plea.