The Government on Tuesday condemned a death sentence handed down to British grandmother Lindsay Sandiford for smuggling a large quantity of cocaine into Bali, promising to do its utmost to keep her from the firing squad.
There were gasps in court as Sandiford, 56, originally from Redcar in Teesside, received her death sentence from a court on the Indonesian holiday island, even though prosecutors had asked for a 15-year jail term in return for her decision to cooperate with the police.
She was caught at the island's international airport in May attempting to bring in 10.6lb (4.8kg) of cocaine, with a street value of £1.6 million, concealed in the lining of her suitcase.
Sandiford, in spectacles and with her hair tied back, hung her head low, turned pale and cried "no, no, no" as the verdict was read out, while her sister Hillary Parson who attended the trial also sobbed.
Hugo Swire, junior minister at the Foreign Office, said: "We strongly object to the death penalty and continue to provide consular assistance to Lindsay and her family during this difficult time."
Mr Swire said "repeated representations" had been made to the Indonesian authorities while William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, had raised the case with his Indonesian counterpart.
Sandiford has two further avenues of appeal and an opportunity to applyfor presidential clemency if those failed. At that point Britain could make a personal appeal for her life.
For now, said a Foreign Office spokesman, "We will leave no doubt that we are not happy. We will make sure this stays on the radar."
Martin Horwood, MP for Cheltenham, where Sandiford lived most recently in Britain before moving to India, called the sentence a shock.
"The days of the death penalty ought to be past. This is not the way that a country that now values democracy and human rights should really be behaving," he said.
Amnesty International described the sentence as "cruel".
Reprieve, the human rights charity, said “she is clearly not a drug king pin — she has no money to pay for a lawyer, for the travel costs of defence witnesses or even for essentials like food and water”.
Sandiford's lawyer said she would appeal, a process that can take several years and which usually leads to commutation to long jail sentences. Until then she will be held Bali's Kerobokan Prison – one of the world's most notoriously hot, dangerous and dirty jails.
Executions in Indonesia are carried out by firing squad, usually at night in isolated and undisclosed locations.
The last was in June 2008, when two Nigerian drug traffickers were shot. There are an estimated 140 people are on death row in its jails, a third of them foreigners.
That number includes another Briton, Gareth Cashmore, 33, a roofer from Wakefield, arrested in 2011 with 6.5kg of methamphetamine hidden in his suitcase.
Explaining the death sentence, the panel of judges said it had decided on the maximum sentence for a number of reasons, including Sandiford's convoluted evidence.
"We found Lindsay Sandiford convincingly and legally guilty for importing narcotics... and sentenced the defendant to death," Judge Amser Simanjuntak told Denpasar district court.
"She also didn't care that the cocaine she smuggled into Bali would have a big impact on people," he continued, adding: "What the defendant has done could tarnish Bali image as a tourism destination."
Indonesian police said Sandiford, who worked for several years in management at DTS Legal in Cheltenham, was at the centre of a drugs-importing ring.
Sandiford argued that she was forced into transporting the cocaine in order to protect her two grown-up sons, whose safety was allegedly at stake.
After her arrest, Sandiford helped police set up a sting operation which led to the arrest of three other Britons and an Indian man.
The others have received light sentences. Rachel Dougall was sentenced to 12 months for failing to report Sandiford's crime and Paul Beales received four years for possession of 3.6 grams of hashish but was cleared of drug trafficking.
A fourth Briton, Julian Ponder, is expected to hear his sentence at the end of this month after prosecutors recommended a seven-year jail term.
Despite Sandiford's claim to be innocent, Kathryn Bonella, an Australian writer who has researched Bali's drugs world extensively for a book Snowing in Bali, was told by a dealer on the island that he had purchased hashish from Sandiford.
"She used to bring him hashish and more recently moved into cocaine. Lindsay had a story [in court] but obviously it wasn't believed," said Ms Bonella.
Several major drug dealers had fled Bali as soon as they heard Sandiford. had been arrested and was cooperating with police, she added.
"She tried to snitch and it backfired spectacularly on her, because it doesn't get any worse than this. Something has happened here, because the prosecutors wanted 15 years."
A former neighbour in Cheltenham described Sandiford as "always up to no good - a real neighbour from hell".
Reprieve, the human rights charity, said Sandiford was the first British woman to be sentenced to death since Linda Carty in the US in 2002. Carty is still on death row.
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