An Australian man charged with selling cocaine in Bali was jailed for more than five years yesterday.
A court on the Indonesian resort island handed down the sentence to Brendon Luke Johnson, arrested last year with almost 12 grams of cocaine hidden at his rental home in Kerobokan. The 43-year old designer from Brisbane had been living in Bali for four years when he was caught, claiming he sold the drugs to pay for his addiction.
Johnson and his Indonesian girlfriend Remi Purwanti were each given five years and four months in prison by the Bali court.
Foreigners are regularly arrested for drugs offences in Bali, which attracts millions of visitors to its palm-fringed beaches every year.
Indonesia has some of the world’s toughest anti-drug laws and traffickers can be sentenced to death.
Earlier this year, a Tanzanian man was arrested in Bali for trafficking after more than a kilogram of methamphetamine was found in plastic baggies inside his stomach.
In Lombok, an island next to Bali, Frenchman Felix Dorfin is facing a possible death sentence case.
He was caught in September allegedly carrying a false-bottomed suitcase filled with four kilograms (8.8 pounds) of drugs — including cocaine, ecstasy and amphetamines — at the airport.
Several foreigners and Indonesians have been executed by firing squad in recent years, including Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in 2015.
The accused ringleaders of the Bali Nine drug syndicate were caught attempting to smuggle heroin from Indonesia to Australia.
- With additional reporting by Coconuts Bali.
Reader Interactions