Pilot gets 15 months for smuggling drugs
Pilot gets 15 months for smuggling drugs
JAKARTA (JP): A Garuda Indonesia Airways pilot, Mohammad Said,
was sentenced to 15 months in jail Wednesday by a Dutch court for
attempting to smuggle 6,000 Ecstasy pills to Jakarta.
A team of judges headed by A. Van der Perk in Amsterdam
District Court handed down the sentence without the 50-year-old
pilot being present.
The senior pilot was found guilty of an attempt to smuggle.
The prosecutors' charge that Said, arrested on June 29 last year
at the Schippol Airport, worked for an international drug
syndicate was unsubstantiated, Antara reported.
Said's lawyers said they would appeal to the Amsterdam High
Court on the grounds that judges had denied Said's right to have
a star witness, called Informant 1500, testify.
Informant 1500 was the one who gave information to police that
led to Said's arrest. The lawyers said if the informant was
summoned, they would have been able to disprove the charges.
They said Said, who was released from detention on June 29
after his nine-month maximum temporary detention period was over,
did not attend Wednesday's sentencing in protest of the trial's
"unfairness".
Said's lawyer O.C. Kaligis said Wednesday that he lodged a
protest on Judge Van der Perk's "unfairness" with the European
Court in Strasbourg, France.
Kaligis said a defendant's right to have star witnesses
testify was a basic right guaranteed by the 1950 Rome Convention
on protection of defendants' rights.
"The fact that the Amsterdam court chose to shelter Informant
1500 shows that the convention was violated," Kaligis said.
Another of Said's lawyers, Nicolaas Meijering, said he had
information that Informant 1500 was in fact a criminal who was
once jailed for seven years.
The Amsterdam District Court gave Said six months' leniency,
which automatically means Said will not have to serve time in
prison because he was already in detention for nine months.
"For us, however, the case isn't over yet. We insist that
Informant 1500 be summoned to testify in court," lawyer Meijering
said.
Meijering said that although his team successfully proved that
Said was not involved with any drug syndicate, they still believe
their client was a "victim of Amsterdam Police political play."
Meijering also said judging from the verdict, Amsterdam
Police should immediately apologize to both the Indonesian
government and the Indonesian Embassy in the Netherlands for
earlier charging that a staff member of the embassy was involved
in the Ecstasy trafficking. (aan)