BOBIGNY: A Frenchman reprieved after 18 years on death row in Indonesia for alleged drug offences landed back in France on Wednesday and was taken to jail, prosecutors said. Serge Atlaoui, 61, was driven from the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport to a court where a prosecutor informed him where he would be held in custody. He was then taken to the jail on the outskirts of Paris, they said. Atlaoui was arrested in 2005 at a factory in a Jakarta suburb where dozens of kilograms 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. 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 said he was “very moved and relieved” to know his client was in France, and would be seeking permission to visit him in prison as soon as possible. Sedillot had earlier said he would work to have his sentence “adapted” so that the father of four could be released. An Indonesian court initially sentenced Atlaoui to life in prison, but the supreme court changed that to a death sentence on appeal in 2007. The Frenchman was due to be executed alongside eight others in 2015 but was granted a reprieve after Paris applied pressure and the Indonesian authorities allowed an outstanding appeal to proceed.

Atlaoui’s 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. He had left Jakarta for Paris on Tuesday evening on board a KLM flight via Amsterdam. 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 Filipina 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. — AFP