Here are the four Nigerians who are
to be executed in Indonesia for drug trafficking.
Martin Anderson
50 year old Martin Anderson (above) was
arrested in Jakarta in 2003 on a charge of possessing about 1.8 ounces of
heroin and was accused of being part of a local drug ring. He had traveled to
Indonesia on a fake Ghanaian passport and has been incorrectly identified as
Ghanaian.
He was sentenced to death in 2004. According to his lawyer, Kusmanto,
who like many Indonesians uses one name, Mr. Anderson was shot in the leg
during his arrest — a method the Indonesian police are sometimes known to use
when apprehending a suspect — and remains bothered by the wound to this day.
He has been in poor spirits since being transferred to
Nusakambangan Island for execution, Mr. Kusmanto said. Mr. Anderson has filed
for a judicial review of his conviction and death sentence with the Supreme
Court, but his lawyer said he feared the court would not consider the appeal
until after he is executed. Such appeals can take six months to be heard, Mr.
Kusmanto said. “Obviously we hope it’s sooner.”
Silvester Obiekwe Nwolise
47 year old Silvester Obiekwe Nwolise’s story, as his wife tells it, is
similar to those of other Nigerians on Indonesia’s death row for drug
trafficking. Unemployed in Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, he was lured to
Pakistan by fellow Nigerians on the promise of a job with good wages.
But once in Pakistan, instead of a job, he got an offer to
swallow some capsules – filled with goat horn powder, his wife, Fatimah Farwin,
says he was told – and fly to Indonesia.
“They said they didn’t want to pay tax on it,” Ms. Fatimah
said. “When he arrived at the airport in Jakarta, the police saw him – I don’t
know how – they caught him and X-rayed him, and they found it and it was
drugs.”
Arrested in 2001, Mr. Nwolise was convicted the following
year of bringing 2.6 pounds of heroin into the country, and was sentenced to
death.
During his trial, according to Ms. Fatimah, Mr. Nwolise had
no translator, and his Indonesian lawyer could barely communicate with him. She
said that a judge, through an intermediary, offered to sentence him to prison
rather than death if he paid a bribe of 200 million rupiah, worth about $22,000
at the time. “But he was just a poor courier. He didn’t have any money,”
Ms. Fatimah said.
Ms. Fatimah, who is Indonesian, met Mr. Nwolise in prison in
2007, when she was accompanying a friend who was visiting another inmate. The
two married later that year; they have since had two children, now 5 and 3, but
she has not brought them to see him since they were infants. She has told them
that their father is working in an office in another country.
In January, the Indonesian police accused Mr. Nwolise of
running a drug syndicate from prison. No charges were brought, but Ms. Fatimah,
who says emphatically that her husband is innocent of the accusation, believes
it resulted in his being placed in the group of inmates now facing imminent
execution.
“Some woman on the outside blamed him,” Ms. Fatimah said,
referring to a police informant, “but when they came to his cell, they never
found anything – never, never, never. He never had a trial and next thing, they
wanted to execute him.”
Jamiu Owolabi Abashin
50 year old Jamiu Owolabi Abashin was living on the streets of Bangkok
in 1998 when a fellow African living there took pity on him and brought him
home. Shortly thereafter, according to Mr. Abashin, his new friend asked
whether he wanted a quick-paying job, in which he would get $400 for bringing a
package of clothing to the friend’s wife in Surabaya, Indonesia, where she sold
used shirts and pants.
Mr. Abashin readily agreed, but soon wished he hadn’t: The
package contained nearly 12 pounds of heroin, and he was arrested after landing
at Surabaya’s airport. Mr. Abashin, who was traveling on a false Spanish
passport, contended he was duped.
He was convicted in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison,
which was reduced to 20 years on appeal. State prosecutors challenged the
sentence reduction before the Indonesian Supreme Court, which in 2006 sentenced
Mr. Abashin to death.
In a request for presidential clemency in 2008, he admitted
knowingly smuggling the drugs. The request was denied in January.
The Indonesian government refers to him as Raheem Agbaje
Salami, the name on the fake Spanish passport he was using when he was
arrested.
Ursa Supit, an Indonesian legal activist who is advocating
on Mr. Abashin’s behalf, says that because he had no money, he was assigned a
state lawyer for his trial and had no legal counsel when he appealed to the
Supreme Court.
Mr. Abashin, who now has a lawyer, is challenging Mr. Joko’s
rejection of his clemency request.
“He has been inside now for 17 years, and he has never
broken a rule inside,” Ms. Supit said. “And now they are going to execute him.
He’s never had money for lawyers. It’s not fair.”
Okwudili Oyatanze
The YouTube clip shows what seems to be a typical Sunday
religious service at a small church. A young African man, accompanied by an
Asian guitarist, sings a heartfelt gospel song as the audience sings along. But
the camera does not show the security guards, iron bars and barbed wire fences
that would have indicated this was no ordinary place. The singer, Okwudili
Oyatanze, was giving his regular performance at a penitentiary outside the
Indonesian capital, Jakarta.
Known in Indonesia’s penal system as “The Death Row Gospel
Singer,” Mr. Oyatanze, 41, was arrested in 2001 while trying to smuggle 5.5
pounds of heroin through Jakarta’s international airport, in his stomach, after
arriving on a flight from Pakistan. He was convicted the following year and
sentenced to death.
Mr. Oyatanze has made the most of his incarceration, writing
more than 70 songs and recording multiple albums behind bars. He has performed
with prison guards as well as fellow inmates.
In the video, shot in 2008, Mr. Oyatanze sang his song “God
You Know,” which was also the name of an album he released that year.
“He has turned his life around in jail,” said the Rev.
Charles Burrows, a Catholic priest from Ireland who now lives in Indonesia and
is offering religious counseling to Mr. Oyatanze as he awaits his execution.
Raised in southeastern Nigeria, Mr. Oyatanze started a garment
business in 1999, traveling to Indonesia to buy clothing and resell it in
Nigeria. The business collapsed, and Mr. Oyatanze, heavily in debt, traveled to
Pakistan to try to revive it, at the suggestion of a fellow Nigerian living
there.
The plan involved swallowing capsules of heroin before
boarding a flight to Jakarta. “There was a chance to earn some easy money, so
he became a courier,” Mr. Burrows said.
NewYorkTimes
