A pregnant Briton sentenced to life in prison in Laos for drugs trafficking was yesterday due to be sent home to serve out her sentence, just weeks before the expected birth of her baby.
Samantha Orobator, 20, who was first arrested a year ago, was due to fly to Bangkok and then on to Britain, Lao foreign ministry spokesman Khenthong Nuanthasing said on Wednesday.
The spokesman said there would be a “handover ceremony” at 8:30pm. Orobator was then scheduled to fly out on a Bangkok-bound Thai Airways flights at 9:45pm.
“She has served one year in Laos. The rest will be served in the UK — we got assurances from the UK side,” the spokesman said.
A court in Vientiane convicted Orobator in June of trafficking 680g of heroin almost a year ago, when she was caught trying to board a plane to Thailand.
Normally, anyone found with more than 500g of heroin faces execution, but the Lao government gave assurances to Britain that a pregnant woman would not receive the death penalty.
Orobator was sentenced in June to life in prison and ordered to pay a fine of 600 million kip (US$70,000).
Before her trial, a Lao government spokesman said that to his knowledge, no foreigner had ever been executed in the country.
Human rights group Amnesty International said last year that no executions had been carried out in Laos since 1989, but urged the communist authorities to “go a step further by formalizing the de facto moratorium.”
Last week, Britain and Laos signed an agreement paving the way for the transfer of Orobator.
The two sides had already signed a prisoner transfer agreement in May.
But as it was taking time to put the measure into effect, a special memorandum of understanding was signed to allow Orobator to leave while she was still physically able to fly, British officials have said.
British legal charity Reprieve, which earlier sent a representative to Laos in a bid to assist Orobator, has said she is due to give birth next month.
It remains unclear how Orobator became pregnant while in jail, but her mother Jane said in late May that her daughter was not sexually assaulted in prison and that the father of her unborn child was not a Lao prison official.
The Vientiane Times newspaper quoted unnamed police as saying Orobator had allegedly admitted impregnating herself with the sperm of another prisoner “to avoid the death penalty.”
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