Long wait: Sandiford before being repatriated, at Kerobokan Prison in Badung regency. — AFP
Two British drug convicts including a grandmother on death row flew home 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 last year.
Lindsay Sandiford, 69, was sentenced to death in Bali in 2013 after she was convicted of trafficking drugs.
She was repatriated along with Shahab Shahabadi, 36, who was serving a life sentence for drug offences after his arrest in 2014.
Both left Bali on a Qatar Airways flight to London via Doha early yesterday, an official from Indonesia’s law and human rights ministry confirmed.
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, I Nyoman Gede Surya Mataram, 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.”
Sandiford wound up behind bars after Indonesian customs officers found cocaine hidden in a false bottom of her suitcase when she landed in Bali in 2012.
Sandiford admitted to the offences but said she had agreed to carry the narcotics after a drug syndicate threatened to kill her son. — AFP
