Briton gets 14 years for Indonesia drug smuggling
Print Edition
A British woman was jailed for 14 years yesterday but escaped the death penalty after admitting that she smuggled crystal methamphetamine into Indonesia.
Andrea Waldeck, a former police worker, was found guilty and sentenced at the court in the city of Surabaya, in Indonesia’s main island of Java.
The sentence was lower than prosecutors’ recommendation of 16 years for the 43-year-old, who had smuggled 1.5 kilograms of crystal meth into Indonesia. She could have received the death sentence for smuggling that quantity of drugs under Indonesian anti-narcotics laws, which are some of the toughest in the world.
“Andrea Waldeck has been proven legally and convincingly guilty of offering to sell or become a middle person to sell drugs,” said presiding judge Faturrachman, who like many Indonesians goes by one name.
He handed her a 14-year sentence and ordered her to pay a 2-billion-rupiah (US$167,000) fine.
Waldeck admitted at a previous hearing that she had smuggled the drugs into Indonesia, arriving at Surabaya airport from China.
In a hearing earlier this month, she said she was ashamed of her actions.
She was arrested late April at a hotel in Surabaya. She arrived a day earlier at the city’s airport from China and managed to get past security with the drugs concealed in four plastic packages inside her underwear, the indictment said.
Two members of a drugs gang had been en route to the hotel to pick up the narcotics, but police knew about the plan and managed to get there first and arrest Waldeck, it said.
Waldeck told the court that her boyfriend in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou had asked her to traffic the drugs in exchange for US$5,000, according to her indictment.
She had previously worked in southwestern England as a police community support officer, a part-time member of the force with limited powers.
Waldeck’s case comes after British grandmother Lindsay Sandiford was sentenced to death in January last year after she was caught trying to bring US$2.4 million worth of cocaine into the Indonesian resort island of Bali.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
