FORMER British community support officer Andrea Waldeck has blamed a Nigerian gang for luring her into drugs after she was sentenced to 14 years in jail for attempting to smuggle crystal meth into Indonesia.
Yesterday, Ms Waldeck, 43, a former community support officer with Gloucestershire Police, was sentenced by a court in Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city. Last April, she was arrested in her hotel room in Surabaya, with £3,000 worth of crystal meth hidden in black bags in her underwear.
It had been originally feared that Ms Waldeck would be given the death penalty as Indonesia boasts of some of the harshest anti-drugs laws in the world. However, prosecutors only demanded a sentence of 16 years, of which she got 14 and was ordered to pay the equivalent of a £100,000 fine.
Dressed in a red prisoner’s bib and clutching a copy of the bible, Ms Waldeck was then led from the court to begin her sentence. She had earlier told the court that smuggling 3l pounds of crystal meth into the country last year was the most stupid thing she had done in her life.
Ms Waldeck blamed her state of mind at the time and her defence team also argued that she had carried the drugs, worth £3,000, into the country under duress after being threatened by a Nigerian man in China. Apparently the Nigerian man had told her that people from his country killed people.
She said the man had told her: "I’m Nigerian. You know about Nigerians, we kill people.”
Judges were told that Ms Waldeck was not a big player in the drug syndicate that existed in China and that she had received no reward for carrying the drugs when she flew in into Surabaya from Guangzhou in China last April. Originally from Talgarth in Powys, Ms Waldeck left the Gloucestershire Police in February 2012 to travel across the world to China.
She told police and her lawyers that she had intended travelling to Indonesia from her base in the city of Guangzhou to set up a furniture import-export business. However, she said she had fallen in with the wrong crowd and a Nigerian friend threatened her if she did not agree to carry the crystal meth when she set off on her planned business trip to Indonesia.
Police sources said they were tipped off about the drugs Ms Waldeck was carrying but waited until she had checked into a three-star hotel in Surabaya before pouncing. She was making a phone call to a contact she had been told to ring when police raided her room.
For now, the key player in the drugs syndicate who was to receive the drugs in Surabaya is still on the run. Indonesia has some of the harshest anti-drug laws in the world and recently announced that it was planning to execute 10 death row prisoners every year.
Condemned prisoners are taken to an orchard or beach late at night and tied to a post or chair where they are shot by a police firing squad. More than 140 people are on death row in Indonesia for drug crimes, with a third of them being foreigners.
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