Frenchman returns home after Indonesian death row reprieve: airport source

Arab News

05-02-2025

Serge Atlaoui, 61, was to be driven from the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris to court and then on to jailAtlaoui's lawyer Richard Sedillot has said he would work to have his client's sentence 'adapted' so that the father of four could be releasedBOBIGNY, France: A Frenchman reprieved after 18 years on death row in Indonesia for alleged drug offenses landed back in France on Wednesday, an airport source said.Serge Atlaoui, 61, was to be driven from the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris to court and then on to jail, according to 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.A prosecutor in Bobigny would inform Atlaoui 'of his imprisonment in France in execution of his sentence,' the public prosecutor's office there said before he landed.He will then immediately be taken to prison, it added.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.Atlaoui had left Jakarta for Paris on Tuesday evening on board a KLM flight via Amsterdam.His return was made possible after an agreement between French Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin and his Indonesian counterpart, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, on January 24.In the agreement, Jakarta said it had decided not to execute Atlaoui and authorized his return on 'humanitarian grounds' because he was ill.Atlaoui was tight-lipped and wore a face mask at a news conference at Jakarta's main airport, after he was driven there in a black van from the capital's Salemba prison and handed over to French police officers.Indonesia has some of the world's toughest drug laws and has executed foreigners in the past.The Southeast Asian country has in recent weeks released half a dozen high-profile detainees, including a Filipino mother on death row and the last five members of the so-called 'Bali Nine' drug ring.According to French association Ensemble contre la peine de mort ('Together Against the Death Penalty'), at least four other French citizens are on death row around the world: two in Morocco, one in China, and a woman in Algeria.