The sixties from Metz was imprisoned in 2005 for drug trafficking. An accusation that he has always disputed. Ten years ago, he escaped in extremis at death.
Serge Atlaoui will miraculously get out of the death corridor, where he spent more than 17 years, in Indonesia. On February 4, the 61-year-old welding craftsman from Metz in northeast France will be repatriated, due to the deterioration of his state of health. A relief for his family, who fought during all these years to make him free.
On November 11, 2005, Serge Atlaoui was arrested during the dismantling of a underground laboratory in Ecstasy, in the suburbs of Jakarta. Thirty people are arrested, including a Dutch and five Chinese. The Frenchman then maintains that he had only established machines in what he thought was an acrylic factory and claims to have accepted this black work two months earlier to reimburse a bank loan contracted to afford a pavilion. If the task is physically trying, it allows Serge Atlaoui to earn 2,000 euros per week.
HAS Paris Match the wife of the welder craftsman, Sabine Atlaoui, confides that her husband leaves for a first mission for six weeks and works in a factory «vide». Then, he returned there a second time, for two mornings, and quickly felt the wind turns by attending a conversation. But the police intervene in the process.
Before arriving in Indonesia, the Frenchman worked for a long time for the Renault Industrial Vehicles in Annonay, Ardèche. Then in factories in North and Lorraine. The year of his arrest, Serge Atlaoui leaves with his wife in the Netherlands, and launched his activity on his own.
Years of procedures to release it
Initially sentenced to life prison, Serge Atlaoui sees the Supreme Court weighing down the sentence, sentenced him to capital punishment on appeal in 2007. He was then imprisoned on the Ile-Prison of Nusakabangan. The case then makes great noise in Indonesia, where anti -Drogue legislation is one of the most severe in the world. Today, the country currently has at least 530 convicted in the death corridor. Among them, more than 90 foreigners, according to the Ministry of Immigration and Correctional Services.
-After the death sentence of Serge Atlaoui, Sabine – whom he married in prison in 2007 -, supported by the association “Together against the death penalty” (ECPM), multiplies the steps to save her husband. She wrote to Robert Badinter, at the origin of the abolition of the death penalty in France and meets advisers from President Sarkozy. When her finances allow, Sabine Atlaoui visits her husband in Indonesia. In 2011, the fourth son of the prisoner and first child of the couple, designed in prison, was born.
In 2015, he escaped his execution
The family keeps hope. But in 2014, the new Indonesian president Joko Widodo rejects all requests for grace of the death sentences for drug trafficking. A year later, the French must be executed alongside eight other convicted people. Finally, he obtained on the edge A temporary stay after Paris intensified the pressure, the Indonesian authorities who have agreed to let an unanswered call follow its course.
Since then, Serge Atlaoui has exhausted all the remedies and even if Jakarta has suspended the executions since 2016, he remains sentenced to death. His daily life is punctuated by readings, his follow -up of French news and his family calls. “It is an essential link for him to feel alive, that he does not allow himself to be invaded by the death corridor”noted Sabine Atlaoui to AFP in 2020.
Sick, Serge Atlaoui was then transferred to Salemba prison in Jakarta to follow a treatment in a hospital in the capital until recently. Seeing its state deteriorating too quickly, France officially requested on December 19 the transfer of the condemned to Indonesia. This was finally granted this Thursday, January 23. The fate of Serge Atlaoui once he has arrived on French soil could be specified this Friday.
