Indonesian activists hold coins during a protest against what they say is pressure from Australia on the government to cancel upcoming executions of Australian citizens, outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta yesterday.

DPA
Jakarta


Indonesia said a convicted Brazilian drug smuggler could still be executed despite claims by his family that he is schizophrenic, local media reported yesterday.
Attorney General Mohamed Prasetyo said Rodrigo Gularte, 42, was mentally sound when he was convicted and sentenced to death in 2005 for smuggling cocaine into Indonesia.
“We are seeking a second opinion from an independent doctor because the one who certified him as mentally ill was a doctor appointed by his lawyers,” Prasetyo was quoted as saying by Kabar24 news website.
Prasetyo said Gularte could still be executed under Indonesian law regardless of his present condition, the report said.
“The law only exempts pregnant women and children under 18 years old,” he reportedly said.
Gularte is among seven foreign drug convicts and several Indonesians who have exhausted their appeals and face execution next month.
They could escape execution if President Joko Widodo changes his mind and grants a pardon.
The foreigners include two Australians and one each from the Philippines, France, Nigeria and Ghana.
They had been scheduled to be executed in February but officials said isolation cells at the Nusakambangaan penal island off Java, where they are to be shot by firing squad, were still being built.Officials have said nothing could stop the convicts from being executed after their requests for presidential clemency were rejected.
But the government has been under pressure from human rights groups, and families of the convicts to look at individual cases.
Attorney General spokesman Tony Spontana said a date for the executions had not been decided.
“But we’re almost done with the preparations,” he said.
Gularte’s planned execution has sparked a diplomatic row between Indonesia and Brazil.
Fellow Brazilian citizen Marco Archer Cardoso Moreira, 53, was executed in Indonesia last month along with five other convicts, in the country’s first executions since 2013.
Australia has also become embroiled in a diplomatic tangle over the planned execution of Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, ringleaders of the so-called Bali Nine drug smuggling ring of Australians.



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