DENPASAR, Indonesia (AP) — Three British nationals accused of smuggling nearly a kilogram (over two pounds) of cocaine into Indonesia were charged Tuesday in a court on the tourist island of Bali. They face the death penalty under the country’s strict drug laws.
Convicted drug smugglers in Indonesia are sometimes executed by firing squad.
Jonathan Christopher Collyer, 28, and Lisa Ellen Stocker, 29, were arrested on Feb. 1 after customs officers halted them at the X-ray machine after finding suspicious items in their luggage disguised as food packages, said prosecutor I Made Dipa Umbara.
Umbara told the District Court in Denpasar that a lab test result confirmed that ten sachets of Angel Delight powdered dessert mix in Collyer’s luggage combined with seven similar sachets in his partner’s suitcase contained 993.56 grams (2.19 pounds) of cocaine, worth an estimated 6 billion rupiah ($368,000).
Two days later, authorities arrested Phineas Ambrose Float, 31 after a controlled delivery set up by police in which the other two suspects handed the drug to him in the parking area of a hotel in Denpasar. He is being tried separately.
The drugs were brought from England to Indonesia with a transit in the Doha international airport in Qatar, Umbara said.
The group successfully smuggled cocaine into Bali on two previous occasions before being caught on their third attempt, said Ponco Indriyo, the Deputy Director of the Bali Police Narcotics Unit during a news conference in Denpasar on Feb. 7.
After the charges against the group of three were read, the panel of three judges adjourned the trial until June 10, when the court will hear witness testimony.
Both the defendants and their lawyers declined to comment to media after the trial.
About 530 people, including 96 foreigners, are on death row in Indonesia, mostly for drug-related crimes, the Ministry of Immigration and Corrections’ data showed. Indonesia’s last executions, of an Indonesian and three foreigners, were carried out in July 2016.
A British woman, Lindsay Sandiford, now 69, has been on death row in Indonesia for more than a decade. She was arrested in 2012 when 3.8 kilograms (8.4 pounds) of cocaine was discovered stuffed inside the lining of her luggage at Bali’s airport. Indonesia’s highest court upheld the death sentence for Sandiford in 2013.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says Indonesia is a major drug-smuggling hub despite having some of the strictest drug laws in the world, in part because international drug syndicates target its young population.
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Associated Press writer Niniek Karmini in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.
