Two British drug convicts including a grandmother on death row flew home early yesterday as part of a deal to return them on humanitarian grounds.
Indonesia has some of the world’s toughest drug laws, but has moved to release more than half a dozen high-profile detainees in the past year.
Lindsay Sandiford, 69, was sentenced to death in Bali in 2013 after she was convicted of trafficking drugs.
Photo: AFP
She was repatriated along with Shahab Shahabadi, 36, who was serving a life sentence for drug offenses after his arrest in 2014.
Both left Bali on a Qatar Airways flight to London via Doha, an official from the Indonesian Ministry of Law said.
They had been presented before the media in a handover ceremony at Kerobokan jail a day earlier, with Sandiford covering her face.
Their “detention will be moved to the United Kingdom” under the bilateral deal, the official told reporters.
“For Lindsay and Shahab, after we hand [them] over to the United Kingdom government, [they] are fully responsible for the legal decision that will be given there, but still respecting our legal decision,” the official added.
Sandiford wound up behind bars after Indonesian customs officers found cocaine worth an estimated US$2.14 million hidden in a false bottom of her suitcase when she landed in Bali in 2012.
Sandiford admitted to the offenses, but said she had agreed to carry the narcotics after a drug syndicate threatened to kill her son.
The repatriation comes after Indonesian Coordinating Minister for Legal, Human Rights, Immigration and Correction Yusril Ihza Mahendra signed a deal with British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper last month for the transfer of Sandiford and Shahabadi.
Both prisoners are suffering from severe health problems.
Yusril last month said that Sandiford was “seriously ill,” while Shahabadi was “suffering from various serious illnesses, including mental health issues.”
British Deputy Ambassador to Indonesia Matthew Downing said that the two were being repatriated on “humanitarian grounds.”
“When they first arrive in the UK, the priority will be about their health,” he said. “So they’ll be going through a health assessment, and any treatment and rehabilitation that they need.”
The two would be “governed by the law and procedures of the UK” government upon their return, Downing said.
Sandiford’s case caught tabloid attention, with one newspaper publishing in 2015 an article in which she detailed her fear of death.
“My execution is imminent, and I know I might die at any time now. I could be taken tomorrow from my cell,” she wrote in the Mail on Sunday. “I have started to write goodbye letters to members of my family.”
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