Two Britons arrested in Bali over alleged cocaine smuggling

JAKARTA: Two British men have been arrested on suspicion of smuggling over a kilogram of cocaine onto the Indonesian resort island of Bali, an official said on Tuesday, potentially exposing them to some of the world’s toughest drug laws.

Indonesia commonly sentences drug traffickers to death, although the country has not carried out such a sentence for nearly a decade.

Rudy Ahmad Sudrajat, the head of the Bali Narcotics Agency, said an airport security officer intercepted one of the men, a 29-year-old identified by his initials K.G., during a security check last Wednesday.

An X-ray check subsequently found around 1.3 kilogrammes (2.9 pounds) of cocaine in his bag, he told a press conference.

Rudy said K.G. had been “asked by someone named Santos to carry the bag… from Barcelona to Bali” and deliver it to another British man there.

Police arrested the second man, another Briton identified as P.E., at a villa in Bali’s Badung district on Thursday.

Rudy said the pair were friends who lived in Thailand and had met in Barcelona a week before their arrests, adding that there was “a possibility they are a part of a cartel.”

Dozens of foreigners, including a cocaine-smuggling British grandmother, are on death row in Indonesia for drug offences.

Indonesia last carried out executions in 2016, killing one of its own citizens and three Nigerian drug convicts by firing squad.–AFP

© New Straits Times Press (M) Bhd

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