Foreigners on death row in Indonesia, including British drug smugglers Lindsay Sandiford and Gareth Cashmore, fear they could be executed “within weeks”, reports The Guardian.
The country was widely condemned last year after a group of prisoners, including two Australian men known as the Bali Nine duo, faced the firing squad.
The chatter has grown “ominous” once more, says the Guardian. “Talk that the death squad is at the ready; that a new, bigger execution ground is in the making. Officials say it could be just weeks away.”
A total of 14 prisoners were executed in two separate rounds last year, but a third group was put on hold – “ostensibly for economic reasons, but perhaps, in part, for political ones, too,” says the newspaper.
Security minister Luhut Panjaitan has expressed hopes for less “drama” this time around, although that seems unlikely, after Indonesia was booed at the United Nations last month over its support for executing drug offenders.
There is nothing definitive yet, no date, and no official list of the next prisoners to face the firing squad: the Indonesian government is keeping its cards close to the chest,” says the Guardian. “But some are still operating on the assumption that it is probably just a matter of time.”
Sandiford, a grandmother from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, claims she was forced to carry 10lbs of cocaine from Bangkok to Bali by a criminal gang who threatened the life of her sons.
Cashmore, from Wakefield, West Yorkshire, was originally handed a life sentence for drug smuggling, but the penalty was raised to a death sentence in 2012.
At the time, his mother, Lynne, said she could not understand why her son was being sentenced to death when Umar Patek, a militant convicted of making explosives used in the 2002 Bali bombings, which left 200 people dead, was sentenced to just 20 years in jail.
Source: The Week
