British grandmother Lindsay Sandiford’s life on Bali’s death row: ‘if you want to shoot me, shoot me’
- The only woman to have been sentenced to death for drug crimes in Bali, Sandiford has come to terms with her situation
- At any time and at just 72 hours’ notice, she could be taken to face the firing squad on Indonesia’s ‘execution island’
Chatty, cheerful and brimming with mischievous gossip, Lindsay Sandiford sits cross-legged, knitting a pink baby blanket, and talks affectionately about her sons and the granddaughters she dotes on, whose faces smile out from pictures stuck on the walls around her bed.
“They are a joy – a real joy,” she beams, gazing at the photos of the young cousins, aged one and six. “The younger one is marvellously bonkers. She’s such a character. If I was to die tomorrow, I would be happy I’ve had that relationship with them. It is the most important thing in my life.”
What might sound like a melodramatic slice of whimsy from an indulgent grandparent has a darker resonance when spoken by 62-year-old Sandiford, who sits knitting while on death row, in Indonesia. She could be taken to face the firing squad at any time.
Sandiford, from Yorkshire in Britain, was sentenced to death in 2013 for smuggling 10lb of cocaine from Bangkok to Bali and has spent the past six years in a five-metre-by-five-metre cell with four other women in the island’s notorious Kerobokan prison, ironically nicknamed Hotel K.
Two friends from her time in jail have been taken away in the dead of the night to be executed and she knows that, at 72 hours’ notice, she could be taken under armed escort to Nusa Kambangan, the country’s execution island, 700km away, on the southern coast of Central Java.
A legal-cost draftsman in Cheltenham before she separated from her husband and moved to India, Sandiford was arrested as she arrived in Bali in 2012, carrying a suitcase with a false bottom stuffed with the illicit drug that fuels the holiday island’s manic nightlife. The unlikeliest of mules, she had no previous convictions and claims she only agreed to meet syndicate members in Bangkok and take the suitcase to Bali after the Britain-based drugs gang threatened to kill her younger son if she refused.