AFP/Cilacap

A Frenchman on death row in Indonesia was yesterday transferred under heavy police guard from a prison island, the day before he starts a last-ditch court bid to avoid the firing squad.
Serge Atlaoui has been detained on the island of Nusakambangan in Central Java, known as Indonesia’s “Alcatraz,” since he was sentenced to death in 2007 on drugs charges.
He is among a group of drug convicts, including nationals from Australia, Brazil, the Philippines, Ghana and Nigeria, who face imminent execution after recently losing their appeals for presidential clemency.
Atlaoui was released yesterday evening from one of Nusakambangan’s maximum security prisons and taken by ferry to Cilacap, the Javanese port town that is the gateway to the island, according to an AFP reporter at the scene.
He was transferred in handcuffs to a waiting vehicle, where heavily armed police escorted him in a convoy from the port.
A French embassy official confirmed to AFP that Atlaoui, 51, was being transferred ahead of his case.
He will travel overland to a court more than 400 kilometres  away in Tangerang, an industrial city just west of the capital Jakarta. Today, a court in Tangerang will hold an initial hearing into his request for a judicial review of his sentence.
Atlaoui had his appeal for clemency rejected in January by Indonesian President Joko Widodo, a vocal supporter of capital punishment for drug offenders. A request for presidential clemency is typically the final chance to avoid the firing squad.
The Frenchman had never lodged a judicial review of his sentence until this year, when the sudden execution in January of six prisoners — including five foreigners — prompted his family to begin urgent legal action.
The father-of-four was arrested near Jakarta in 2005 in a secret laboratory producing
ecstasy.