Indonesia | Lindsay Sandiford convinced she will be released soon

A British drugs mule grandmother on Indonesia's death row is so convinced she will be freed from prison that she has started given her clothes away to other inmates.

Lindsay Sandiford, 67, has been incarcerated in a cramped cell inside Bali's hellish Kerobokan prison since 2013 where she is facing execution by firing squad.

The grandmother-of-two was sentenced to death for attempting to smuggle £1.6million worth of cocaine into Indonesia's capital by stuffing it into the lining of her suitcase.

But her pals say she has now 'slumped into depression' as she thought she would have been released by now due to a change in the country's law.

The new legislation means Sandiford could have her death sentence converted to a life prison term as she has served more than a decade behind bars where she has shown good behaviour.

A source told The Mirror: 'She's given away all her clothes and things she had because she was expecting to be released already. But it's understood she will be released in a few months, along with other westerners.

'The new Indonesian president has, among his many changes, said he wants ro reduce the numbers in jail.

'Local people are being released, then overseas people are to be looked at. Already the Australian drug group known as the Bali Nine are back in Australia.'

The Briton, from Yorkshire, who has no previous convictions, claimed she was forced by a UK-based drugs syndicate to smuggle cocaine from Thailand to Bali by threats to the life of one of her two sons in Britain.

She received a death sentence despite cooperating with police in a sting to arrest people higher up in the syndicate, sparking an outcry from human rights lawyers and former UK Director of Public Prosecutions Ken Macdonald who said she had been treated with 'quite extraordinary severity'.

The syndicate's alleged ringleader Julian Ponder, 50, from Brighton, was freed from Kerobokan prison in late 2017 following rumours more than £1 million in bribes were paid to drop trafficking charges against Ponder, his former partner Rachel Dougall, and fellow Briton Paul Beales.

Dougall served one year and Beales four years for involvement in the conspiracy.

Now grey-haired and suffering arthritis, Sandiford spends days at a time knitting in the cramped five metres-by-five-metres cell prison she shares with four other women prisoners, most of them poorly-educated local women convicted of drug offences.

The prison houses 1,300 inmates – four times the amount of people the prison was built for in 1979 - and has previously been described by inmates as a 'hellhole' with frequent 'murders, rapes, drug overdoses and bashings'.

One Indonesian woman imprisoned for corruption said last March that Sandiford was seen as the jail's 'queen'.

Examples of the drug mule's special treatment allegedly include being able to order medium-rare steak once a week.

But she added that the grandmother had led knitting classes for her fellow inmates.

Source: Mail Online, Matt Strudwick, March 16, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

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