Three Brits face firing squad for ‘smuggling cocaine inside Angel Delight sachets’

Three British people face the death penalty after being charged with smuggling nearly a kilo of cocaine into Bali.

Jonathan Christopher Collyer, 28, and Lisa Ellen Stocker, 29, were detained at Denpasar International Airport after customs officers flagged suspicious items in their luggage. Prosecutors said the contents of 10 sachets of Angel Delight in Collyer’s case and seven desert packets in his partner’s baggage tested positive for cocaine.

The 993.56g is worth an estimated six billion rupiah (£270,000). Two days later, Phineas Ambrose Float, 31, was arrested in a sting by police pretending to stage a delivery in the parking area of a hotel in Denpasar.

He is being tried separately. If convicted, the trio face the death penalty. Convicted drug smugglers in Indonesia are sometimes executed by firing squad.

The drugs were brought from England to Indonesia with a transit in the Doha international airport in Qatar, prosecutor I Made Dipa Umbara said.

Ponco Indriyo, the Deputy Director of the Bali Police Narcotics Unit, previously told reporters the trio successfully took drugs with them into Bali twice before being caught. 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 the defendants and their lawyers declined to comment to media after the trial.

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. Indonesia’s last executions, of an Indonesian and three foreigners, were carried out in July 2016.

A British woman, Lindsay Sandiford, now 69, has been on death row in Indonesia for more than a decade. She was arrested in 2012 when 3.8 kilograms of cocaine was discovered stuffed inside the lining of her luggage at Bali’s airport.

Indonesia’s highest court upheld the death sentence for Sandiford in 2013.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says Indonesia is a major drug-smuggling hub despite having some of the strictest drug laws in the world, in part because international drug syndicates target its young population.