Frenchman Atlaoui returns to Paris after reprieve from death row in Indonesia
French national Serge Atlaoui returned to his home country on Wednesday after spending 18 years on death row in Indonesia for alleged drug offences. Jakarta authorised Atlaoui's return on “humanitarian grounds” and left it to the French government to grant him either clemency, amnesty or a reduced sentence.
A Frenchman reprieved after 18 years on death row in Indonesia for alleged drug offences landed back in France on Wednesday, an airport source said.
Serge Atlaoui, 61, is to be transported from the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris to court and then on to jail, said a source close to the case and the prosecutor’s office in the nearby town of Bobigny.
Under an agreement last month between both countries for his transfer, Jakarta has left it to the French government to grant him either clemency, amnesty or a reduced sentence.
France abolished capital punishment in 1981.
Atlaoui’s lawyer Richard Sedillot has said he would work to have his client’s sentence “adapted” so that the father of four could be released.
Atlaoui was arrested in 2005 at a factory in a Jakarta suburb where dozens of kilogrammes of drugs were discovered, with Indonesian authorities accusing him of being a “chemist”.
A welder from Metz in northeastern France, he has always denied being a drug trafficker, saying that he was installing machinery in what he thought was an acrylic factory.
(AFP)
Read more on FRANCE 24 English
Read also:
Frenchman held on death row in Indonesia leaves for Paris
Indonesia, France agree to repatriate French death row convict Serge Atlaoui