Death-row Frenchman leaves Indonesia jail for transfer home: prison officials

A 61-year-old Frenchman sentenced to death in Indonesia in 2007 for drug offences left prison in Jakarta on Tuesday, prison officials told an AFP journalist at the site, before being escorted to the airport to fly to France in the evening.

Serge Atlaoui, whose transfer was agreed by Paris and Jakarta on January 24, is expected to land in Paris on Wednesday morning and will immediately appear in front of the prosecutor in Bobigny, according to his lawyer Richard Sedillot, who will then request his release.

Atlaoui was arrested in 2005 at a factory in a Jakarta suburb where tens of kilos of drugs were discovered and accused of being a "chemist" by the authorities.

A welder from Metz in northeastern France, the father of four has always denied being a drug trafficker, saying that he was installing machinery in what he thought was an acrylic factory.

"I thought there was something suspicious (about the factory)," Atlaoui told AFP in 2015.

Initially sentenced to life in prison, his sentence was reviewed by the supreme court and changed to death on appeal.

He was due to be executed alongside eight others in 2015, but was granted a reprieve after Paris applied more pressure and the Indonesian authorities allowed an outstanding appeal to proceed.

There are currently at least 530 inmates on death row in Indonesia, according to the human rights organisation Kontas, referencing official figures.

Among them 90 foreigners, including at least one woman, according to the Ministry of Immigration and Correction.

The Indonesian government recently signalled it will resume executions, on hiatus since 2016.

In December, Filipina inmate Mary Jane Veloso, who was arrested in 2010 and also sentenced to death for drug trafficking, was returned to her home country after an agreement was reached between both countries.

Source: RTL, Staff, February 4, 2025

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