Two British men have been jailed in Indonesia after being found guilty of smuggling cocaine into the holiday island of Bali.
Kial Garth Robinson, 29, of Littlehampton, was sentenced to 11 years in prison, while Piran Ezra Wilkinson, 48, from Chichester, was jailed for nine years.
Both were also ordered to pay a fine of around £45,000 or serve an extra 190 days in prison.
Robinson was arrested last September when customs officers at Ngurah Rai International Airport found two packages containing 1.3kg of cocaine in his backpack.
He told police that he was ordered by a man to transport the drugs from Barcelona, Spain, to Bali and deliver them to Wilkinson – who had arrived a few days earlier, Reuters news agency reported on Thursday.
Wilkinson was arrested in Canggu, on the south coast of Bali, the following day.
Prosecutors said Robinson and Wilkinson were friends who lived in Thailand and had met in Barcelona a week before their arrests.
On Thursday, Robinson’s lawyer Robert Khuana said: “These items were brought from Barcelona to Bali, but they aren’t meant for distribution.
“My client was purely a courier, but he knew he was trapped in a syndicate scenario and was persuaded with $5,000 and another $5,000 for debt repayment and he was therefore willing to bring the drugs to Bali.
“What made the sentence harsher was that his actions threatened the security against drug distributions in Indonesia.
“Although he didn’t know the contents of the package, he knew the contents were dangerous. If he had known, he wouldn’t have done what he did.”
Reacting to the sentencing, the UK Foreign Office “We are providing assistance to two British nationals detained in Indonesia and are in contact with the local authorities.”
Indonesia has some of the world’s strictest anti-narcotics laws and drug trafficking can be punishable by death.
Although Indonesia has executed foreigners in the past, it has upheld a temporary halt on the death sentence since 2017.
Indonesia last carried out executions of foreigners in 2016, killing three Nigerian drug convicts by firing squad, according to AFP,
Last July, three British nationals from Sussex avoided the death penalty for smuggling cocaine disguised as packets of Angel Delight into the country.
Lisa Stocker, 39, and her husband Jon Collyer, 38, were arrested at Bali’s international airport in February 2025 after being caught with 994g of the Class A drug. Phineas Float, 31, was due to receive the packages and was arrested a few days later.
All three, from Hastings and St Leonards, East Sussex, were told by the judge that they would only serve a 12-month sentence and would be eligible for release in early 2026.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s administration has moved in recent months to repatriate several high-profile inmates, all sentenced for drug offences, back to their home countries.
