Convict Gurdip’s life ‘spared’ by Jakarta

Simran Sodhi

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 28

The execution of Gurdip Singh, Jalandhar man who was sentenced to death in Indonesia in a drug trafficking case, was dropped at the last minute, highly placed sources said. 

A report from Cilacap said Indonesia had executed one local and three Nigerian drug convicts. They were put to death by a firing squad shortly after midnight, said Noor Rachmad, deputy attorney general for general crimes.

Rachmad did not say why 10 other drug convicts, including the Indian, were not executed. “The executions were for now conducted on four convicts on death row,” he said.

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Earlier, 14 convicts, including foreigners from Nigeria, Pakistan, India and Zimbabwe as well as Indonesians, were to be executed.

“This is not a fun job. For us, this is really a sad job because it involves people's lives. This was done not in order to take lives but to stop evil intentions, and the evil act of drug trafficking,” said Rachmad.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had tweeted last night that the government was making last-minute efforts to save Gurdip.

Earlier in the day, Indonesia had rebuffed appeals from distraught relatives, rights advocates and foreign governments to abandon its execution plans. The European Union and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights too had called on Indonesia to impose an immediate moratorium on executions.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had appealed to Indonesia's government to halt the executions. Ban recalled that under international law, the death penalty should be used for the most serious crimes and “drug crimes are generally not considered to meet this threshold.”