The
offenders, who were arrested at different times, have been incarcerated
in Indonesia jail for a few years and have unsuccessfully appealed
their death penalty through separate lawyers.
Their
last appeal, which seemed like a last option was presidential clemency,
and it was denied. And despite heavy criticism from the international
community, asking the government to waive their death penalty, the
Indonesian authority did not give in.
The photos and profiles of the prisoners, with four of them Nigerians, were released online and published on New York Times portal on Friday, April 24.
Find the profiles below:
Martin Anderson, 50, Nigeria - Possession of Heroin
Martin
Anderson was arrested in Jakarta in 2003 on a charge of possessing
about 1.8 ounces of heroin and was accused of being part of a local drug
ring. He had traveled to Indonesia on a fake Ghanaian passport and has
been incorrectly identified as Ghanaian.
He was sentenced to death in 2004.
According
to his lawyer, Kusmanto, who like many Indonesians uses one name, Mr.
Anderson was shot in the leg during his arrest — a method the Indonesian
police are sometimes known to use when apprehending a suspect — and
remains bothered by the wound to this day.
He has been in poor spirits since being transferred to Nusakambangan Island for execution, Mr. Kusmanto said.
Mr.
Anderson has filed for a judicial review of his conviction and death
sentence with the Supreme Court, but his lawyer said he feared the court
would not consider the appeal until after he is executed.
Such appeals can take six months to be heard, Mr. Kusmanto said. “Obviously we hope it’s sooner.”
Silvester Obiekwe Nwolise, 47, Nigeria - Smuggling Heroin
Silvester
Obiekwe Nwolise’s story, as his wife tells it, is similar to those of
other Nigerians on Indonesia’s death row for drug trafficking.
Unemployed in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, he was lured to Pakistan by
fellow Nigerians on the promise of a job with good wages.
But
once in Pakistan, instead of a job, he got an offer to swallow some
capsules – filled with goat horn powder, his wife, Fatimah Farwin, says
he was told – and fly to Indonesia.
“They said
they didn’t want to pay tax on it,” Ms. Fatimah said. “When he arrived
at the airport in Jakarta, the police saw him – I don’t know how – they
caught him and X-rayed him, and they found it and it was drugs.”
Arrested
in 2001, Mr. Nwolise was convicted the following year of bringing 2.6
pounds of heroin into the country, and was sentenced to death.
During
his trial, according to Ms. Fatimah, Mr. Nwolise had no translator, and
his Indonesian lawyer could barely communicate with him. She said that a
judge, through an intermediary, offered to sentence him to prison
rather than death if he paid a bribe of 200 million rupiah, worth about
$22,000 at the time.
“But he was just a poor courier. He didn’t have any money,” Ms. Fatimah said.
Ms.
Fatimah, who is Indonesian, met Mr. Nwolise in prison in 2007, when she
was accompanying a friend who was visiting another inmate. The two
married later that year; they have since had two children, now 5 and 3,
but she has not brought them to see him since they were infants. She has
told them that their father is working in an office in another country.
In
January, the Indonesian police accused Mr. Nwolise of running a drug
syndicate from prison. No charges were brought, but Ms. Fatimah, who
says emphatically that her husband is innocent of the accusation,
believes it resulted in his being placed in the group of inmates now
facing imminent execution.
“Some woman on the
outside blamed him,” Ms. Fatimah said, referring to a police informant,
“but when they came to his cell, they never found anything – never,
never, never. He never had a trial and next thing, they wanted to
execute him.”
Jamiu Owolabi Abashin, 50, Nigeria - Smuggling Heroin
Jamiu
Owolabi Abashin was living on the streets of Bangkok in 1998 when a
fellow African living there took pity on him and brought him home.
Shortly thereafter, according to Mr. Abashin, his new friend asked
whether he wanted a quick-paying job, in which he would get $400 for
bringing a package of clothing to the friend’s wife in Surabaya,
Indonesia, where she sold used shirts and pants.
Mr.
Abashin readily agreed, but soon wished he hadn’t: The package
contained nearly 12 pounds of heroin, and he was arrested after landing
at Surabaya’s airport. Mr. Abashin, who was traveling on a false Spanish
passport, contended he was duped.
He was
convicted in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison, which was reduced to
20 years on appeal. State prosecutors challenged the sentence reduction
before the Indonesian Supreme Court, which in 2006 sentenced Mr. Abashin
to death.
In a request for presidential clemency in 2008, he admitted knowingly smuggling the drugs. The request was denied in January.
The
Indonesian government refers to him as Raheem Agbaje Salami, the name
on the fake Spanish passport he was using when he was arrested.
Ursa
Supit, an Indonesian legal activist who is advocating on Mr. Abashin’s
behalf, says that because he had no money, he was assigned a state
lawyer for his trial and had no legal counsel when he appealed to the
Supreme Court.
Mr. Abashin, who now has a lawyer, is challenging Mr. Joko’s rejection of his clemency request.
“He
has been inside now for 17 years, and he has never broken a rule
inside,” Ms. Supit said. “And now they are going to execute him. He’s
never had money for lawyers. It’s not fair.”
Okwudili Oyatanze, 41, Nigeria - Smuggling heroin
A
YouTube clip (see below) shows what seems to be a typical Sunday
religious service at a small church. A young African man, accompanied by
an Asian guitarist, sings a heartfelt gospel song as the audience sings
along. But the camera does not show the security guards, iron bars and
barbed wire fences that would have indicated this was no ordinary place.
The singer, Okwudili Oyatanze, was giving his regular performance at a
penitentiary outside the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.
Known
in Indonesia’s penal system as “The Death Row Gospel Singer,” Mr.
Oyatanze, 41, was arrested in 2001 while trying to smuggle 5.5 pounds of
heroin through Jakarta’s international airport, in his stomach, after
arriving on a flight from Pakistan. He was convicted the following year
and sentenced to death.
Mr. Oyatanze has made the
most of his incarceration, writing more than 70 songs and recording
multiple albums behind bars. He has performed with prison guards as well
as fellow inmates.
In the video, shot in 2008,
Mr. Oyatanze sang his song “God You Know,” which was also the name of an
album he released that year.
“He has turned his
life around in jail,” said the Rev. Charles Burrows, a Catholic priest
from Ireland who now lives in Indonesia and is offering religious
counseling to Mr. Oyatanze as he awaits his execution.
Raised
in outheastern Nigeria, Mr. Oyatanze started a garment business in
1999, traveling to Indonesia to buy clothing and resell it in Nigeria.
The business collapsed, and Mr. Oyatanze, heavily in debt, traveled to
Pakistan to try to revive it, at the suggestion of a fellow Nigerian
living there.
The plan involved swallowing
capsules of heroin before boarding a flight to Jakarta. “There was a
chance to earn some easy money, so he became a courier,” Mr. Burrows
said.
Mary Jane Veloso, 30, Philippines - Smuggling Heroin
Mary
Jane Veloso left school after seventh grade and was married by the time
she was 16. A few years later, her husband left her with two children
and no financial support.
“We were so poor,” Ms.
Veloso’s older sister, Marites Laurente, recalled of their time growing
up. “We were just picking up bottles and plastic in the road to sell to
make money.”
In April 2010, according to Ms.
Veloso’s family, a labor recruiter who lived nearby told her she could
find work as a maid in Malaysia, a well paying job with no education
required. Ms. Veloso put a few garments into the only luggage her family
had – a child’s backpack – and boarded a flight to the Malaysian
capital, Kuala Lumpur, with the recruiter.
There,
according to her father and sister, Ms. Veloso was told that the
original job had been canceled, but that there was a similar job
available in Indonesia. The recruiter took her out shopping for clothes
and bought her a new suitcase.
“When she lifted
the bag, it was heavy,” Ms. Laurente said. “My sister said she had a bad
feeling about it, but when she opened the bag it was empty.”
The
recruiter flew back to the Philippines, the family said, and Ms. Veloso
boarded a flight for the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, where she
expected her new employer to meet her at the airport. Instead, she was
met by Indonesian officials, who discovered more than five pounds of
heroin hidden inside the lining of the suitcase.
Prosecutors claim that Ms. Veloso was a willing courier, according to local media reports.
Ms.
Veloso was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. Ms. Laurente said
her sister, who spoke no Indonesian and very little English, was unable
to understand what was taking place during the trial, being assisted by a
young translator whose English was also very limited.
The Philippine government has flown Ms. Veloso’s family members to Jakarta twice to visit her in prison.
“The
guards and the other people there in the prison are so kind,” Ms.
Laurente said. “They love my sister so much. They are trying to make her
happy. They are taking good care of her. She is fat now like me.”
Ms.
Veloso’s relatives live in a cluster of wooden houses along a dirt path
off the main road near the town of Cabanatuan, about 60 miles north of
Manila. Her sons, now 6 and 12, are cared for by their grandparents.
“They
are always asking, when is momma coming back?” Ms. Laurente said. “We
tell him that she will come home in a year. We can’t tell them the
truth.”
Serge Atlaoui, 51, France - Running A Narcotics Factory
Serge
Atlaoui was arrested in 2005 during a police raid on a factory outside
Jakarta that was producing the drug ecstasy. According to Mr. Atlaoui, a
welder by trade, he had moved to Indonesia from the Netherlands with
the understanding that he would be working on machinery in an acrylics
factory.
"He was never informed of the actual use
of the machines, otherwise, as a married man and father of three
children at the time, he wasn't going to take the risk of going to
Indonesia," said his lawyer, Richard Sédillot.
Mr. Atlaoui was sentenced to death in 2007.
His
case has drawn considerable attention in France, where news outlets
have said that he would be the first Frenchman subjected to capital
punishment since France abolished it in 1981.
France
has been pressing Indonesia to spare him; on Thursday, Foreign Minister
Laurent Fabius wrote in a letter to his Indonesian counterpart that
“serious dysfunction” in the country’s legal system had denied Mr.
Atlaoui his rights. On Saturday, Mr. Atlaoui got an unexpected reprieve
pending another review of his case in a state court.
Mr.
Atlaoui’s wife, Sabine, said that her husband had been mischaracterized
in court as a leader of the drug ring. She said he had noticed soon
after starting the job that there was suspicious activity at the
factory, but that he had never taken part in manufacturing drugs. He
tried to get out of the situation as soon as he could, but he was
arrested before he could do so, she said.
"Overnight,
we found ourselves in a nightmare," she said. "I told myself, this
can't be reality, it isn't possible for this kind of thing to happen."
The
couple married in 2007, after Mr. Atlaoui had been imprisoned but
before he had been sentenced to death. They have since had one child,
who is now 3 years old; they have three other children from previous
marriages, all now in their 20s.
"When we are
together, we give each other a lot of energy, strength and courage,"
Mrs. Atlaoui said. "We give hope to each other, even if the situation is
critical.”
She said she had never doubted her husband's innocence. "He is an honest, respectful and very generous man," she said.
Zainal Abidin, 50, Indonesia - Marijuana Possession With Intent To Distribute
Zainal
Abidin was at his modest home in Palembang, in South Sumatra Province,
in December 2000 when two friends knocked on his door asking for a place
to stay for the night. They were carrying several large burlap sacks
that Mr. Zainal, according to his lawyer, believed to contain rice.
Hours
later, after the police raided his home in the middle of the night, his
lawyer said, he found out that the sacks were stuffed with 129 pounds
of marijuana.
The police had arrested one of the
visitors, Aldo bin Hasan Umar, who had left the house after midnight and
tried to sell a small quantity of the marijuana on the streets.
Mr.
Umar told the police that Mr. Zainal was the ringleader of a plan to
sell the marijuana. In 2001, Mr. Zainal was convicted and sentenced to
15 years in prison. Later that year, the South Sumatra High Court
overturned the sentence and gave him the death penalty.
During
his trial, his lawyers argued that Mr. Zainal, a laborer at a local
furniture factory, could not afford to buy such a large quantity of
marijuana, but the judges rejected the claims that Mr. Zainal was not
involved.
Mr. Umar was sentenced to 20 years in
prison, and a third man convicted in connection with the case was given
four years. Both were eventually granted parole and today are free,
while Mr. Zainal faces the firing squad.
“He was
fingered for being the owner of the house where the sacks were found,
but it was his friends who brought them there,” said Ade Yuliawan, Mr.
Zainal’s current lawyer. “His punishment should not have been more
severe than what the actual drug dealers received.”
Mr.
Ade also said the legal process against his client was flawed because
the Supreme Court did not respond to Mr. Zainal’s 2005 request for a
judicial review of his conviction and death sentence until this past
January, 10 years after he filed it. Mr. Ade said the court told him
that the filing did not follow proper procedures.
Rodrigo Gularte, 42, Brazil - Smuggling Cocaine
Rodrigo
Gularte, an avid surfer from Brazil, was arrested in 2004 trying to
smuggle 13 pounds of cocaine into Indonesia, hidden in several
surfboards. He was tried in a courtroom outside Jakarta and sentenced to
death in 2005.
His lawyers say he never should
have been in a courtroom at all. Doctors in both Indonesia and Brazil
have certified that he suffers from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Indonesia’s criminal code forbids the prosecution of people with mental
illness, requiring instead that they be sent to a mental health center.
Mr.
Gularte’s current attorneys, who have represented him only since March,
say they have no idea who their client’s previous lawyer was or whether
his mental illness was ever brought up at trial.
“He
was diagnosed as schizophrenic at the age of 16,” said Ricky Gunawan,
who is leading Mr. Gularte’s defense team. “From what we know, his
lawyer never appeared at his trial hearing, and he was given the death
penalty.”
Mr. Gularte’s lawyers say his drug abuse
as a younger man was a mask for his deeper problems. They and Mr.
Gularte’s family have released Brazilian medical records dating back
more than 20 years, as well as evaluations by Indonesian doctors after
his 2004 arrest, supporting their contention that he is mentally ill.
But
the office of Indonesia’s attorney general, which recently sought a
second opinion from police psychiatrists, says he is mentally fit.
Prosecutors, however, have neither released that new psychiatric
evaluation nor shared it with Mr. Gularte’s legal team.
A
Brazilian government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity
because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly, said Mr.
Gularte does not understand the gravity of his situation.
“He
does not think he’s going to die,” the official said, adding that “on
many occasions he stated that he refuses to leave the prison, something
that can probably be attributed to his paranoia.”
In
a meeting with psychiatrists in March, according to Brazilian news
reports, Mr. Gularte spoke of ghosts and mentioned a fear of
electromagnetic waves from satellites watching him from above.
Mr.
Gularte’s cousin Angelita Muxfeldt, who has been visiting him twice a
week in prison, called the ordeal “emotionally difficult.”
Andrew Chan, 31, Australia - Smuggling Heroin
Andrew
Chan’s older brother, Michael, believes his sibling’s wrong turns may
have begun when Michael left home at 18, leaving Andrew without a role
model. Their parents, striving Chinese immigrants, worked long hours
seven days a week in the family’s Chinese restaurant.
Andrew began to get into mischief at about 13 or 14, Michael said, and dropped out of high school at 16.
“He
drifted and started to experiment with drugs, and he found himself in
that culture that led him to offend,” said Michael O’Connell, a lawyer
on Andrew’s defense team.
In 2005, Mr. Chan and
eight other Australians were arrested on the Indonesian resort island of
Bali, some of them at an airport with heroin strapped to their bodies.
An Indonesian court found Mr. Chan and Myuran Sukumaran to have been the
ringleaders in a plan to smuggle the drugs out of the country.
He does not deny his crime.
“The
only thing I can do is apologize,” he said in a 2006 television
interview. “It makes me want to become a better person today. When you
are young, you think you are invincible.”
He and
his supporters say he has long since reformed. He converted to
Christianity while in prison and became a counselor to other inmates.
This year, he was ordained as a minister.
“Being
incarcerated makes you take a long, hard look at yourself,” said
Christie Buckingham, an Australian pastor who helped supervise Mr.
Chan’s religious training.
“Both boys have done
that,” she said of Mr. Chan and Mr. Sukumaran. “They needed role models
when their parents were not present.”
“Every human being has a desire to belong,” she said. “Andrew went in the wrong direction. Anyone can do that.”
Michael Chan says he has no doubt Andrew thinks about that decision every day.
“It
is what it is,” he said. “But I believe he is sorry. He knows it has
not just jeopardized his life, but had an impact on everyone.”
Myuran Sukumaran, 34, Australia - Smuggling Heroin
Myuran
Sukumaran was arrested on his 24th birthday on the Indonesian island of
Bali, where he and a fellow Australian, Andrew Chan, were found to have
been the ringleaders in a plot to smuggle several pounds of heroin out
of the country.
When he looks back on that time now, he thinks “how stupid I was back then,” he said in a recent television interview.
The quick payoff was the lure. “I was hoping to buy a car,” he said. “I was hoping to start a business.”
In
Kerobakan prison, Mr. Sukumaran has said in interviews, he found a
sense of purpose that he lacked before. He developed an interest in
painting, and he contacted the Australian painter Ben Quilty, who soon
became a friend and mentor.
Mr. Quilty considers the convict a gifted artist.
“Because
Myuran has been incarcerated and on death row, there’s been a real need
for him to be introspective, to turn the mirror on himself
metaphorically and physically,” Mr. Quilty said.
Mr.
Quilty and other supporters of Mr. Sukumaran, who has become a cause
célèbre in Australia, say he helped create an art studio in the prison
and organize courses for inmates in art and other subjects.
“Hundreds
of inmates have benefited from his work,” said Tina Bailey, a pastor
with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, based in Bali. “He has the
respect of the guards, the inmates and the prison authorities for all
the work he has done.”
His younger brother, Chinthu Sukumaran, said in an interview that Myuran “was never really a bad person.”
“He wanted to be successful,” he said. “He was childish and selfish, but it was only that. Nothing more.
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