Kenyan drug dealer gets life sentence

Urip Hudiono, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A Kenyan defendant escaped the noose on Tuesday, when the Central Jakarta District Court decided to show mercy by sentencing him to life imprisonment for drug trafficking.

The sentence is much more lenient than the maximum penalty of death sought by prosecutors of Okeke Nelson Sunday Orange Moa Mwangai, 29, for attempting to smuggle 1.129 kilograms of heroin into the country.

Tuesday's verdict comes a day after the Attorney General's Office announced that President Megawati Soekarnoputri had rejected appeals for leniency from seven convicts on death row for drug-related cases.

The appeals included those of Thai citizens Saelon Praseart and Namson Sirilak, who were convicted along with Indian citizen Ayodya Prashad Chaubey, of smuggling 12.9 kilograms of heroin. Ayodya was executed by firing squad last Thursday.

Presiding judge Agus Subroto said that witness testimonies and evidence presented to the court were sufficient to find Mwangai guilty as charged of violating Article 82 of Law No. 22/1997 on narcotics, for the illegal smuggling of the most highly controlled drug.

"The defendant's action in packing the heroin into capsules which he later ingested to avoid detection was evidence of a smuggling attempt," Agus said.

Nigerian-born Mwangai confessed he was promised US$20,000 by a friend, Ikena, in December to transport the heroin from Karachi to Denpasar via Bangkok and finally to Jakarta, where he would then deliver the heroin to Anselem, a Nigerian citizen.

Ikena had instructed him to split the heroin into 67 rubber capsules, which he then swallowed, to elude inspection at airport checkpoints.

The Jakarta Police narcotics division, which received a tipoff about Mwangai's arrival in January, arrested him at a hotel in Tanah Abang, Central Jakarta. The capsules were detected in a hospital X-ray examination and were later confirmed by the police forensic laboratory as containing heroin.

The court took into consideration that the defendant's action could have caused irreparable mental and physical harm to the nation's youth if the drugs he had tried to smuggle had ever reached the streets.

In mitigation, the court found the defendant had confessed and showed remorse for his crimes, and was fully cooperative during the trial.

Prosecutor Fajar Rudi was slightly disappointed at the verdict, as the judges had differed in the appropriate sentence for the defendant, although they agreed with the prosecution in finding the defendant guilty as charged.

"Defendants in similar cases, which involve drugs in similar amounts, usually get the death sentence," he said. "We are thinking about filing an appeal."