Three Britons could face the death penalty in Bali after appearing in court charged with smuggling nearly a kilogram of cocaine into Indonesia.
Jonathan Christopher Collyer, 28, and Lisa Ellen Stocker, 29, were arrested on 1 February after customs officers stopped them at the X-ray machine after finding suspicious items in their luggage, prosecutors claimed.
A lab test result confirmed that 10 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, or over two pounds, of cocaine, worth an estimated six billion rupiah (£272,000), prosecutor I Made Dipa Umbara told the District Court in the regional capital Denpasar.
Phineas Ambrose Float, 31, was arrested two days later after police set up a controlled delivery in which the other two suspects allegedly handed him the drug in the parking area of a hotel in Denpasar. He is being tried separately.
Convicted drug smugglers in Indonesia are sometimes executed by firing squad.
About 530 people, including 96 foreigners, are on death row in Indonesia, mostly for drug-related crimes, according to figures from the country’s ministry of immigration and corrections.
One of them, Briton Lindsay Sandiford, now 69, has been on death row for more than a decade after 3.8 kilos of cocaine was found in her luggage in 2012.
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Despite its strict laws, Indonesia is a major drug-smuggling hub, the UN has said, partly because international syndicates target its young population.
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