Two British men have been arrested in the tourist island of Bali for allegedly smuggling more than a kilo of cocaine into Indonesia.
The Bali National Narcotics Agency said the men were members of an international drug trafficking syndicate, according to the Indonesian Antara news agency.
The men, who are only named in local reports by their initials KG, 29, and PE, 48, appeared at a press conference in the city of Denpasar on Tuesday, dressed in orange prison uniforms.
Rudy Ahmad Sudrajat, the head of the Bali Narcotics Agency, said the men smuggled the cocaine from Barcelona, and that both had met in Spain a week before their arrest.
“PE travelled to Bali first and waited for the shipment,” Mr Sudrajat was quoted as saying.
Custom officers at Bali’s Ngurah Rai airport reportedly intercepted KG during a security check on Wednesday after becoming suspicious of his behaviour. A subsequent X-ray of his luggage revealed 1.3kg of cocaine, Antara reported.
KG reportedly admitted he was transporting the drugs to PE, and investigators suspect the pair, who live in Thailand, were offered $5,000 (£3,700) each to traffic the cocaine into Bali and sell it to foreign nationals.
Indonesia has some of the strictest drug laws in the world. People convicted of possession, smuggling or use of illegal drugs face long prison sentences, life imprisonment and even the death penalty for major drug trafficking offences.
In July, three British people were sentenced to one year in jail on drug offences after a charge that could carry the death penalty was dropped, the AP news agency reported.
Jonathan Christopher Collyer, 28, and his partner Lisa Ellen Stocker, 29, were arrested in February by customs officers in Bali after nearly a kilo of cocaine was found hidden among sachets of powdered dessert mix. Two days later, Phineas Ambrose Float, 31, was arrested in a sting operation.
During their trial, they argued they were unaware that the food given to them in England contained cocaine.
Hundreds of people are on death row in Indonesia, mostly for drug-related crimes, including many foreign nationals. The most recent execution occurred in July 2016, when an Indonesian citizen and three foreigners were shot dead by firing squad.
A British woman, Lindsay Sandiford, now 69, has been on death row in Indonesia for more than a decade, AP reported. She was arrested in 2012 with 4.8kg of cocaine in her luggage.
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