A Frenchman reprieved after 18 years on death row in Indonesia for alleged drug offences landed back in France on Wednesday, an airport source said.
Serge Atlaoui, 61, is to be transported from the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris to court and then on to jail, said a source close to the case and the prosecutor’s office in the nearby town of Bobigny.
Under an agreement last month between both countries for his transfer, Jakarta has left it to the French government to grant him either clemency, amnesty or a reduced sentence.
France abolished capital punishment in 1981.
Atlaoui’s lawyer Richard Sedillot has said he would work to have his client’s sentence “adapted” so that the father of four could be released.
Atlaoui was arrested in 2005 at a factory in a Jakarta suburb where dozens of kilogrammes of drugs were discovered, with Indonesian authorities accusing him of being a “chemist”.
A welder from Metz in northeastern France, he has always denied being a drug trafficker, saying that he was installing machinery in what he thought was an acrylic factory.
His return was made possible after an agreement between French Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin and his Indonesian counterpart, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, on January 24.
In the agreement, Jakarta said it had decided not to execute Atlaoui and authorised his return on “humanitarian grounds” because he was ill.
Indonesia has some of the world’s toughest drug laws and has executed foreigners in the past.
The Southeast Asian country has in recent weeks released half a dozen high-profile detainees, including a Filipina mother on death row and the last five members of the so-called “Bali Nine” drug ring.
(AFP)
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