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.”
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
A judge in Bangladesh issued an arrest warrant for the British member of parliament and former British economic secretary to the treasury Tulip Siddiq, who is a niece of former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in August last year in a mass uprising that ended her 15-year rule. The Bangladeshi Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating allegations against Siddiq that she and her family members, including Hasina, illegally received land in a state-owned township project near Dhaka, the capital. Senior Special Judge of Dhaka Metropolitan Zakir Hossain passed the order on Sunday, after considering charges in three separate cases filed
APPORTIONING BLAME: The US president said that there were ‘millions of people dead because of three people’ — Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskiy US President Donald Trump on Monday resumed his attempts to blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for Russia’s invasion, falsely accusing him of responsibility for “millions” of deaths. Trump — who had a blazing public row in the Oval Office with Zelenskiy six weeks ago — said the Ukranian shared the blame with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered the February 2022 invasion, and then-US president Joe Biden. Trump told reporters that there were “millions of people dead because of three people.” “Let’s say Putin No. 1, but let’s say Biden, who had no idea what the hell he was doing, No. 2, and
RSS