Indonesian authorities yesterday escorted an ailing French national who has been on death row in the Southeast Asian country to the airport in Jakarta, marking the start of his return to France under an agreement between the two nations.
Serge Atlaoui, who has spent almost 20 years in an Indonesian prison for drug offenses, won a last-minute reprieve from execution by a 13-member firing squad in 2015, after France’s government stepped up pressure, because Atlaoui still had an outstanding court appeal.
In May 2015, Indonesia executed eight other convicts, but Atlaoui was granted a stay of execution. An Administrative Court in Jakarta denied his last court appeal the following month.
Photo: AFP
The father of four, who is now 61 and reportedly has cancer, made a last-ditch plea to be returned home in December by writing to the Indonesian government requesting to serve the rest of his sentence in France.
Paris responded and the transfer agreement was signed remotely on Jan. 24 by Indonesian Coordinating Minister for Law, Human Rights, Immigration and Correctional Yusril Ihza Mahendra and French Minister of Justice Gerald Darmanin, allowing for Atlaoui to travel home yesterday.
Atlaoui was arrested in 2005 for his alleged involvement in a factory manufacturing the psychedelic drug MDMA, sometimes called ecstasy, on the outskirts of Jakarta. His lawyers say he was employed as a welder at the factory and did not understand what the chemicals on the premises were used for.
Atlaoui, from the town of Metz in France, has maintained his innocence during his 19 years behind bars, claiming he was installing machinery in what he thought was an acrylics plant. Police accused him of being a “chemist” at the site. He was initially sentenced to life, but the Supreme Court in 2007 increased the sentence to death on appeal.
Atlaoui was taken from Salemba Prison in Jakarta yesterday afternoon and taken in a car to the airport, where he was to board a commercial flight to Paris later in the day. He is expected to arrive in Friday this morning.
He made no comment to a crush of reporters outside the prison.
About 530 people are on death row in Indonesia, mostly for drug-related crimes, including nearly 100 foreigners, data from the Indonesian Ministry of Immigration and Corrections showed. Indonesia’s last executions, of an Indonesian citizen and three foreigners, were carried out in July 2016.
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