If you want to shoot me, do it
Drug-smuggling British gran on Bali death row gives up appeals
A BRITISH grandmother due to be executed by firing squad in Bali has given up appealing and says she is ready to die.
Drug mule Lindsay Sandiford, 62, who has been on death row for six years, said: ‘My attitude is, “If you want to shoot me, shoot me – get on with it.”’
She was caught with 9lb of cocaine as she flew into Bali from Bangkok in 2012 and sentenced to death in 2013. Two appeals and a request for presidential pardon have failed.
From her cell at the island’s Kerobokan prison – where she spends her days knitting clothes and toys for her grandchildren, charities and church groups – Sandiford said: ‘Dying doesn’t bother me. I never thought I’d last this long to be honest. What I am uncomfortable about is the public humiliation. You’re dragged halfway around the country and paraded in front of the press before being executed and that will be the worst thing for me.
‘I’ve done a terrible thing, I know, but the worst thing is the ritual public humiliation they seem to enjoy.’
Sandiford, whose two young granddaughters have visited her in prison, has not been given a date for her execution but she said she does not want her family to be there when the time comes.
The grandmother, from Redcar, Teesside, who had no previous convictions, claimed in court she was forced by a UKbased drugs syndicate to smuggle cocaine from Thailand to Bali by threats to the life of one of her two sons in Britain.
She received a death sentence despite co- operating with police in a sting to arrest people higher up in the syndicate who received lesser sentences and have since left prison.
Asked whether she feared execution by firing squad, she said: ‘It’s not particularly a death I would choose but then again I wouldn’t choose dying in agony from cancer either. The one thing certain about life is no one gets out alive.
‘In spite of everything, I feel blessed. I have been blessed to live long enough to see my two sons grow up into fine young men and blessed to have been able to meet my two grandchildren.’
‘In spite of everything, I feel blessed’