Housewife faces death for £1.6m Bali drugs haul

Lindsay Sandiford, 55, was caught with 4.8kg of the drug stuffed in the lining of a suitcase as she arrived in Bali, according to customs officials.

After her arrest on the Indonesian island last week she agreed to take part in a sting operation in which police swooped on four other suspects.

Another British woman, two British men and an Indian man were arrested over the huge seizure.

The head of Bali’s drugs squad said the two British men, identified by the initials BP and JAP, were believed to be senior figures in a major drug-smuggling syndicate.

Sandiford, originally from Redcar, Teesside, is thought to have told police that she only agreed to make the smuggling trip because her children in England were being threatened.

She was paraded at a Press conference alongside the drugs, wearing an orange prison T-shirt and hiding her face from cameras.

Masked armed officers in Kuta, a town on the holiday island, flanked her as she was brought into the room and a customs official cut open packages wrapped in brown tape to reveal a white powder.

Sandiford, listed on immigration documentation as a housewife, was stopped as she arrived at Bali’s Ngurah Rai International Airport on a Thai Airways flight from Bangkok, Thailand, on May 19, customs official Made Wijaya said.

Two days after her arrest she was contacted by the second British woman, identified by the initials RLD, at which point a meeting was arranged.

The 4.791kg haul of cocaine has an estimated street value of 23.9 billion Indonesian rupiah (£1.6m).

Indonesia has extremely strict drug laws. Mr Wijaya said: “This is a big international network. The charge against them would carry the death penalty,”

Another 68g of cocaine, 280g of powdered ecstasy and a small amount of hashish were also seized following the arrest of the other gang members at separate locations in Bali, officials said.

Neighbours who lived next door to Sandiford in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, until she moved out around a decade ago described her as a “neighbour from hell”.

They said the mother-of-two would regularly have late-night visitors to the detached house, which they said was bought with money from a divorce settlement before it was repossessed several years ago.

One neighbour, who did not want to be named, said: “We were glad to see the back of her, really.

“When the house was repossessed they had to completely re-do it.

“She gave the impression of being quite well off and everything, but she was just putting on a facade.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all that she’s been arrested. They were the neighbours from hell, really.”

Another neighbour said: “She had all kinds of strange people turn up with different cars at all different times.

“She just wasn’t the right sort of person for round here.”

Maria Swift, from Cheltenham, previously worked part-time for Sandiford and said: “I did a bit of cleaning for her, it was just to help her out in general. Her boys were a bit messy – which boys can be – and she had an important job to do at the time.”

Mrs Swift said Sandiford was working for a solicitors firm and would work from the house as she cleaned it.

“I’m just gobsmacked because I didn’t see that side of her and it’s hard to believe that she could work for a legal firm and go from one extreme to another.”

Asked if she ever believed Sandiford could become involved in drugs, she replied: “No, no.”