Indonesian police escort Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen from Denpasar District Courtroom after his sentencing trial on February 15, 2006 in Denpasar. PHOTO: AFP
Bali Nine prisoner Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen may be spending the rest of his life in prison, but that hasn’t stopped him from making life-altering plans.
The low-profile, “forgotten” prisoner will get married to an Italian ambulance driver who he met as a sort of pen pal, according to Sydney Morning Herald.
Save the date, they plan on tying the knot on December 12.
Nguyen has experienced considerably less press attention than Bali Nine ringleaders Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan who were executed earlier this April. Nguyen had originally been handed down the death penalty for his role in the 2005 heroin smuggling operation out of Bali, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2008.
To add to Nguyen flying under the radar, no one in Italy even knows who the Bali Nine is in the first place, 26-year-old Lyudmyla Karpova, a Red Cross ambulance volunteer in Italy explained to SMH, saying she had thought Nguyen was “just a normal guy” when they started writing each other last December.
Nguyen says he “slowly revealed” to Karpova who he was, taking her temperature on her opinion of the death penalty and drugs.
But apparently Karpova had already fallen in love with Nguyen and even traveled to Malang, East Java for a month in June to visit the prisoner behind bars.
“My heart was beating really fast,” Nguyen says, as quoted by SMH. “I was so nervous. It wasn’t hard to quickly notice her. She is white and so beautiful.”
“She was real, the feelings were real, and that was when we confirmed about everything,” so Nguyen uttered the words “Marry me,” and Karpova agreed.
Have no qualms, Karpova seems to realize that it won’t exactly be a happy ending for her from here on out.
“Being a wife of someone in jail is hard, being a wife of someone with a life sentence is the hardest thing ever,” Karpova said.
“Sure it would be easier to run away and find a normal, free guy but I can’t. He is my soulmate.”
Believe it or not, Nguyen is not the first Bali Niner to find love in prison. Chan married fiancee Febyanti Herewila on Nusakambangan prison island the day before his execution, while Martin Stephens married Christine Puspayanti in 2011. Scott Rush was engaged to London lawyer Nikki Butler, but that’s sudahlah.
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