A Frenchman has made his way to back to his homeland after spending 18 years in Indonesian custody over smuggling drugs into Bali.
Deported from Indonesia, Michael Blanc, 45, flew back to France on Saturday night out of Jakarta with his mother, Helene Le Touzey, arriving in Paris on Sunday.
Blanc was arrested by police in Bali on December 26, 1999 with 3.8 kilograms of cannabis in scuba diving canisters.
The Frenchman claimed he was carrying the canister for a friend, but Indonesian judges weren’t convinced.
He was originally sentenced to life imprisonment, but obtained clemency and his sentence was reduced to 20 years.
In 2014, Blanc was granted parole—which is not commonly offered to foreigners in Indonesia —and stayed with his mother.
Le Touzey spent nearly two decades in Indonesia to be close to her son.
The Frenchman’s parole ended after three years in 2017, but was followed by a one-year trial, or probation.
Blanc’s life imprisonment was received as overly harsh by France. The country’s then prime minister, Francois Fillon even brought up Blanc’s case during a visit to Indonesia in 2011.
But Blanc was fortunate in the sense that he didn’t get the death penalty, which he narrowly avoided.
More than 70 people, of which 42 are foreigners, are on death row in Indonesia for drug offenses, according to the Coalition for the Abolition of Death Penalty in ASEAN.
With reporting from AFP
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