Indonesia sentenced five Australians to up to three years in jail yesterday for illegally landing a plane last year in Indonesia’s sensitive Papua Province.
The five, who said they believed they could get visas on arrival but were carrying no travel papers, looked shocked as the verdicts were handed down by a court in Papua, which is a highly restricted area.
“I can’t believe this,” said Vera Scott-Bloxam, one of the four passengers, who were given two-year jail terms and fined 25 million rupiah (US$2,275). Her husband William, the pilot, got three years and double the fine.
A lawyer for the Australians — the Scott-Bloxams, Hubert Hufer, Karen Burke and Keith Ronald Mortimer — described the sentences as harsh and immediately promised to appeal.
The two women and three men were arrested when they made an unannounced landing at Mopah airport in Papua’s Merauke district on Sept. 12 after a flight from Horn island, off the northern tip of Australia’s Queensland state.
They told police they were on a private sightseeing trip and believed they could obtain visas on arrival, although they were not carrying travel documents.
“The pilot William Scott-Bloxam has been proven legally and convincingly guilty of violating Indonesian transportation law by illegally entering Indonesian territory,” Judge Des Benner Sinaga told Merauke district court.
The aircraft was also seized by the Indonesian government.
Indonesia imposes tight restrictions on travel to Papua, where a small guerrilla force has been waging a low-level separatist insurgency since the 1960s, and where the Indonesian military is often accused of rights abuses.
Journalists without special permits are barred from the region.
Australians are entitled to visas on arrival in other parts of Indonesia as long as they have valid passports and authorities find no reason to deny them.
Defence lawyer Efrem Fangoihoy said he was surprised at the length of the jail sentences.
“I declare here firmly that we will file an appeal against the verdict, which we consider to be too heavy,” he said.
“This is a very shameful decision. Based on immigration law, there is an exception for pilots and crew that they don’t need a visa to enter our country,” he said.
“Others [such as passengers] cannot be brought to justice as they landed in an airport which is a neutral zone. If they don’t have visas, they should be sent back to their country,” he said.
Indonesian and Australian officials have said that while their actions were foolish, the five posed no threat.
Defence Minister Juwono Sudarsono told reporters after a meeting with his Australian counterpart Joel Fitzgibbon in September that the Australians were “looking for an opportunity to open up tourism.”
Fitzgibbon said they had shown “very, very poor judgment” but added: “There isn’t any evidence that they were up to what we would describe as any sort of activities that should be a threat to Indonesia.”
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS