His next return is welcomed as a relief for those close to him. Serge Atlaoui, 61, was sentenced to death in Indonesia in 2007 and has been on death row ever since. After 19 years in prison, the Frenchman must finally return to France on February 4 after an agreement concluded on Friday between Paris and Jakarta.
The French Minister of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, remotely by videoconference from Paris, and his Indonesian counterpart Yusril Ihza Mahendra, Indonesian Minister in charge of Legal Affairs and Human Rights, signed an agreement on Friday for the transfer of the Frenchman.
Faced with financial difficulties in France, Serge Atlaoui went to Indonesia for the first time in 2005, to install industrial machines in what he believes to be an acrylic factory. A job for which he must be paid 2,000 euros per week. The welder, then 42 years old, eventually suspected that something was wrong.
“When I came back, I saw all these chemicals, it made me tick, I said to myself that there was something fishy,” he told AFP in 2015, adding that he “never received” the promised money.
Accused of drug possession
On November 11, 2005, the police arrived and Atlaoui was arrested and accused of possessing tens of kilos of methamphetamine, ketamine and other substances used in drug production. Based on case law, he thinks he will get away with 15 years in prison, but is sentenced to life in prison for drug trafficking. Worse, in May 2007, the Supreme Court increased the sentence: he must be shot, like eight other members of the “network”.
Paris then intensified pressure to prevent his execution and the Indonesian authorities agreed to let a pending appeal take its course. After years spent in a high-security prison in the “Indonesian Alcatraz” in southeast Java, he is now detained in Salemba Prison in Jakarta. Suffering from a health problem, he goes to a hospital every week to receive treatment.
A model prisoner
Throughout his incarceration, Serge Atlaoui was a “model prisoner”, he restored the water network in his prison and also repaired the framework, adds for AFP Mr. Chenuil-Hazan, general director of the association Ensemble contre la penalty de mort (ECPM) which has supported him since 2007 and him last visited in November 2023.
-Father of four children and married to Sabine Serge Atlaoui “he is quite exceptional, he has always demonstrated of a resilience that commands respect“, adds his French lawyer Richard Sédillot.
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