BANDUNG: Indonesia has handed death sentences to a gang of more than a dozen drug traffickers, including an Iranian couple and a Pakistani man, the prosecutor’s office said.
A total of 13 suspects — three Iranians, a Pakistani and nine Indonesians — were ordered to be executed by firing squad for the gang’s role in smuggling about 400 kilograms of methamphetamine, according to authorities.
The ruling was delivered by video link in West Java’s Sukabumi city, where members of the ring were caught last June, due to Covid-19 restrictions.
Iranian Hossein Salari Rashid led the smuggling plot, said Bambang Yunianto, head of the Sukabumi prosecutor’s office.
“There are four foreigners in the group with (Rashid) the mastermind of the crime. He was sentenced together with his wife,” Yunianto said.
Tuesday’s ruling was a record for the number of drug traffickers sentenced to death at one time in Indonesia, Amnesty International said.
It brought to 30 the number of people given the death penalty in the Southeast Asian nation this year, including several foreigners, the rights group said. Most were drug trafficking cases, it added.
Indonesia has some of the world’s toughest anti-drug laws, but it has held off conducting executions for several years.
In 2019, a French drug trafficker briefly on death row saw his sentence reduced to a long prison term on appeal.
A year earlier, eight Taiwanese smugglers were sentenced to death by an Indonesian court after being caught with around a ton of crystal methamphetamine.
Several foreign traffickers have been executed by firing squad, including Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in 2015, a case that sparked diplomatic outrage and a call to abolish the death penalty.
Pakistani man, Iranian couple get death sentence in Indonesia in drug trafficking case
https://arab.news/bkemu
Pakistani man, Iranian couple get death sentence in Indonesia in drug trafficking case
- A total of 13 suspects ordered to be executed by firing squad for role in smuggling about 400 kilograms of methamphetamine
- Tuesday’s ruling a record for number of drug traffickers sentenced to death at one time in Indonesia, Amnesty International says
Rating firm S&P says it won’t rush Iran war downgrades, sees risks for countries like Pakistan
- Agency says it is monitoring indebted energy importers as higher oil prices strain finances
- Gulf economies seen better placed to weather shock, though Bahrain flagged as vulnerable
LONDON: S&P Global said it would not make any knee-jerk sovereign rating cuts following the outbreak of war in the Middle East, but warned on Thursday that soaring oil and gas prices were putting a number of already cash-strapped countries at risk.
The firm’s top analysts said in a webinar that the conflict, which has involved US and Israeli strikes against Iran and Iranian strikes against Israel, US bases and Gulf states, was now moving from a low- to moderate-risk scenario.
Most Gulf countries had enough fiscal buffers, however, to weather the crisis for a while, with more lowly rated Bahrain the only clear exception.
Qatar’s banking sector could also struggle if there were significant deposit outflows in reaction to the conflict, although there was no evidence of such strains at the moment, they said.
“We don’t want to jump the gun and just say things are bad,” S&P’s head global sovereign analyst, Roberto Sifon-Arevalo, said.
The longer the crisis was prolonged, though, “the more difficult it is going to be,” he added.
Sifon-Arevalo said Asia was the second-most exposed region, due to many of its countries being significant Gulf oil and gas importers.
India, Thailand and Indonesia have relatively lower reserves of oil, while the region also had already heavily indebted countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka whose finances would be further hurt by rising energy prices.
“We are closely monitoring these (countries) to see how the credit stories evolve,” Sifon-Arevalo said.
