Three British nationals accused of smuggling nearly a kilogram of cocaine into Indonesia could face the death penalty under the country’s strict drug laws.
Jonathan Christopher Collyer, 38, and Lisa Ellen Stocker, 39, were arrested at Bali’s international airport in February, their trial heard on Tuesday.
The pair appeared in court alongside Phineas Ambrose Float, 31, who allegedly received the packages but was arrested a few days later.
If convicted, all three defendants from Hastings and St Leonards in East Sussex might be executed by firing squad.
Prosecutor I Made Dipa Umbara said customs officers stopped Collyer and Stocker at the X-ray machine after finding suspicious items in their luggage disguised as food packages.
Mr Umbara told the District Court in Denpasar that a lab test result confirmed that ten sachets of Angel Delight powdered dessert mix in Collyer’s luggage combined with seven similar sachets in his partner’s suitcase contained 993.56 grams of cocaine (2.1 pounds), worth an estimated six billion rupiah - roughly £296,000.
Worried friends had previously posted online appeals to find the couple after they “went off the grid” unaware they’d been arrested.
Two days later, authorities detained Float after a police sting police in which the other two suspects handed the drug to him in the parking area of a hotel in Denpasar. He is being tried separately.
The drugs were brought from England to Indonesia with a transit in the Doha international airport in Qatar, Mr Umbara said.
In February, Ponco Indriyo, Deputy Director of the Bali Police Narcotics Unit, said the group successfully smuggled cocaine into the country on two previous occasions before being caught on their third attempt.
After the charges against the group of three were read, the panel of three judges adjourned the trial until June 10, when the court will hear witness testimony.
Both Collyer and Stocker and their lawyers declined to comment to media. Float was seen disembarking a prison van and hurled abuse at members of the press, telling journalists to “f***k off” as he was led to a holding cell.
A journalist from Agence France-Presse said a verdict was not expected until a later date.
Indonesia hands out severe punishments for drug smuggling and has previously executed foreigners, but has upheld a temporary halt on the death sentence since 2017.
President Prabowo Subianto’s administration moved in recent months to repatriate several high-profile drug dealers back to their home countries.
About 530 people, including 96 foreigners, are on death row in Indonesia, mostly for drug-related crimes, the Ministry of Immigration and Corrections’ data showed.
They include Lindsay Sandiford, 69, a British former legal secretary sentenced to death in January 2013 by a court after being found guilty of smuggling cocaine into Bali.
The Briton, from Yorkshire, who has no previous convictions, claimed she was forced by a UK-based drugs syndicate to smuggle the drug from Thailand to Bali by threats to the life of one of her two sons in Britain.
As of March this year she was still incarcerated in a cramped cell inside Bali's hellish Kerobokan prison.
