Frail Lindsay Sandiford will today begin the 8,000-mile journey home after 13 years on death row in Bali after Prime Minister Keir Starmer reached a deal with Indonesian authorities.
Unlike many passengers on a flight out of Bali today, an exhausted traveler will rejoice as they leave the island paradise.
Among the vacationers and partiers, an elderly woman with health problems will take a seat and pray silently as the plane leaves the runway. Because Lindsay Sandiford has not enjoyed the white sands of the luxurious Indonesian resort: she has spent 13 years living under threat of execution in one of the worst prisons in the world.
His pardon for smuggling £1.6 million of cocaine into the country was finalized in a bilateral deal after months of behind-the-scenes negotiations by UK government authorities. It was the personal plea of Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper that finally secured her freedom, freeing her from the death penalty in a country that has some of the harshest drug laws on the planet.
Now Sandiford, 69, plans to leave Bali in the middle of the night, shortly after midnight in Indonesia, from the same airport where she was caught more than a decade ago. It’s the same terminal where she wore orange clothes and paraded before the media with blocks of Class A drugs stacked on a table in front of her while joyful Indonesian authorities toasted her arrest.
Last year I entered Kerobokan Prison, where Sandiford has languished ever since. Behind the barbed wire walls of the imposing prison, I saw the overcrowded conditions where not only freedom is lost, but also privacy and peace. In a crowded prison there is a constant fight for space. Announcements blare incessantly over the speakers, testing sanity. For her part, Sandiford has survived as best she can, earning the nickname “Grandma” while teaching others to knit.
But far worse than the physical horrors of his confinement is the relentless fear of a trip to Indonesia’s infamous Nusa Kambangan, known as “Execution Island.” Sandiford will no doubt have been informed of the carefully orchestrated execution that awaited her. Taken from her Bali cell in the dead of night and flown to Yogyakarta, she lived in terror during the five-hour journey through the villages of Central Java before being loaded onto a government ship bound for the island.
Sandiford, handcuffed and handcuffed, anticipated that she would be taken from her cells at midnight to face her death. Deep in the forest, in a “death zone” known as Nirbaya, Sandiford, blindfolded, was to be dressed with a white apron around her neck and a red target on her chest.
They would have asked her if she had any final requests, before being lined up in front of a group of shooters (only three with live ammunition) and shot dead.
But instead of a barbaric end, tomorrow at this time she will be starring in a tearful reunion with her loved ones, members of her family who have never lost hope that she can be saved from the firing squad. It remains to be seen whether she will be released immediately or detained by UK authorities when she lands at London Heathrow airport.
What is very clear is that Sandiford served his sentence and paid the price for his crimes. He deserved to return to the UK, where he will be able to access much-needed medical care.
And he has earned the right to leave behind a disturbing 13-year stay in a prison chillingly referred to as Hotel K.
