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)