Lindsay Sandiford has spent more than a decade awaiting execution in Bali for smuggling £1.6million of cocaine onto the island. Now she is due to be freed, she will have to deal with the trauma of spending every day under the threat of death
Lindsay Sandiford’s 12-year nightmare in a rat-infested Bali prison may be coming to an end, but the lasting trauma will haunt her the rest of her life.
Each and every day for more than a decade she has lived under the threat of death, while enduring the squalor of life inside Kerobokan prison. She has lived knowing that every time a key rattled in her cell door, she could be whisked away to Indonesia’s Nusa Kambangan, chillingly nicknamed “Execution Island’.
There – behind the white sands of the tropical isle – awaits a chilling fate. In a carefully choreographed operation, Lindsay, 69, would be blindfolded and taken to the “death zone” where she would be lined up in front of a group of marksmen – only three with live ammunition – and shot dead.
But now, after the Indonesian Government granted her a reprieve, she must deal only with the psychological scars of spending years in one of the worst prisons on the planet. Last year I went inside Kerobokan jail, where inmates sleep on thin mattresses and are housed 40 to 50 people in a cell block.
Behind the razor-wired walls of the imposing prison, I saw the cramped conditions where not only liberty is lost, so too is privacy and peace. In a crammed jail there is a constant jostling for space. Announcements blare incessantly from loudspeakers, testing sanity. For her part, Sandiford has survived as best she could, earning the nickname “Grandmother” while teaching others to knit.
Some sources said she enjoyed special privileges – including medium-rare steak dinners – while others described her “foul-mouthed, antagonistic” drive to drive cell mates out of her room. Behind bars she has been visited by family members, even hugging her grandchildren in April for the first time in years.
And behind the scenes Foreign Office officials have tirelessly worked to secure her freedom, making regular trips to visit her in prison. She has clung to hope of dodging the firing squad thanks to a change in the law in Indonesia which saw other drug smugglers released, including the Bali Nine.
It inspired so much hope in Lindsay – and she was so sure of her release – that over recent months she has given away her clothes and possessions, believing she will no longer need them when she jets back to the UK. A prison source told me earlier this year: “Lindsay has slumped into depression because she has not been released yet.
“She’s given away all her clothes and things she had because she was expecting to be released already. But it’s understood she will be released in a few months, along with other Westerners. The new Indonesian president has, among his many changes, said he wants to reduce the numbers in jail. The jails are so full. Rooms that normally hold 12 are now holding 16. So a new program is needed.”
Today Lindsay will say a final farewell to those who she has called family for more than a decade. But as she boards a flight back to Britain, the true scars of her punishing stint in a notorious prison nearly 8,000 miles from home are yet to be seen.