LEAD: Indonesia executes Indian man for drug smuggling

0 Comments | Asian Political News, August 9, 2004

JAKARTA, Aug. 5 Kyodo

(EDS: UPDATING)

An Indonesian firing squad executed early Thursday an Indian man sentenced to death for smuggling drugs, despite his plea for clemency and the objection of the Indian government.

''A 12-man firing squad executed Mr. Ayodhya Prasadh Chaubey at 2:30 a.m. and a team of doctors declared him dead at 3:05 a.m.,'' North Sumatra Prosecutors' Office chief Sudibyo Saleh told reporters in the provincial capital Medan.

Chaubey, 66, was arrested along with two Thai nationals in Medan in 1994 for allegedly trying to smuggle 12.19 kilograms of heroin into Indonesia. The local district court then convicted and sentenced the Indian man to death in 1995.

The two Thais were also sentenced to death and remain on death row.

The Indian man appealed the ruling to higher courts, but both the Medan High Court and the Supreme Court rejected his appeals and President Megawati Sukarnoputri also turned down his plea for clemency.

Last month, the Indian government expressed objection to the planned execution of Chaubey and repeatedly asked the Indonesian government to reconsider the sentence.

The European Union also urged the Indonesian government to drop the sentence, which it called a ''cruel and inhumane form of punishment.''

''It does not serve as a deterrent and miscarriages of justice are irreversible,'' the European Union said in a statement released a day before the execution.

Chaubey, who taught English to other inmates and officials in Medan's Tanjung Gupta Penitentiary and converted to Islam, professed his innocence to the end.

His lawyers claimed the prosecutors' office had failed to present evidence of the smuggled heroin, only basing their case on witness testimony. They said he was not allowed to meet with his relative before being executed.

Chaubey asked the prosecutors to show evidence with the presence of U.N. and Indian Embassy officials, Medan District Prosecutors' Office chief Faried Hariyanto said.

The prosecutors then tried to show the smuggled heroin to Chaubey on Tuesday without the presence of the officials, but he refused to view the evidence.

Hariyanto said the prosecutors informed Chaubey's family of the planned execution but none of his family members was present.

Before the execution, Chaubey made his last request that he be buried in a Muslim manner.

Indonesia has at least 10 death-row inmates, mostly foreigners from Asian and African countries who were convicted in drug cases. Among them are two young Indonesian women, who were involved in the smuggling of drugs into Indonesia by African drug syndicates.

Fourteen others, who have been sentenced to death for drug trafficking in district courts, have appealed the rulings to higher courts.

The lawyers said that before Chaubey's case, there was one execution for a drug offense in the last 10 years. Malaysian citizen Chan Ting Tong, alias Steven Chong, was shot by a 12-man firing squad for a drug offense.

Human rights campaigners have pushed for an end to the death penalty, which they say violates basic human rights and has proven ineffective in deterring drug dealing.

They also said the death penalty has been politically motivated ahead of the Sept. 20 presidential election runoff between Megawati and former top security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Some international and local nongovernmental organizations, which denounce drug trafficking, have urged Megawati to execute death-row convicts in drug cases.

But Munir, a cofounder and chairman of the independent National Commission on Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), has accused the government of exploiting someone's life ''to woo support'' ahead of the voting.

''Instead of being aimed to deter criminals, the government's decision to impose the death penalty is motivated by political interests as it chose the political momentum as 'the right time' to uphold the sentences,'' he was quoted by the Jakarta Post daily as saying.