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Schapelle Corby released from Bali’s Kerobokan jail Schapelle Corby released from Bali’s Kerobokan jail
(35 minutes later)
Schapelle Corby was released from Bali’s Kerobokan jail on Monday. Schapelle Corby was released from Bali’s Kerobokan prison on Monday morning after nearly a decade of protesting her innocence to the Indonesian legal system.
Television pictures showed a prison van waiting outside the jail on Monday morning before taking the Australian drug trafficker to the local prosecutor’s office. In chaotic scenes, the 36-year-old drug trafficker was escorted from the prison by police through a crowd of about 60 reporters and photographers who had been camped outside the jail for days.
She was taken to the parole board offices where the formalities of her release would be completed. Corby said nothing to the media as she was released. The prison’s governor, Farid Junaedi, told reporters in Indonesian that Corby was still a prisoner and would now begin her parole. He described the 36-year-old as nervous because of the intense media scrutiny.
More than 100 police officers were on standby to escort the van as crowds of local people, tourists and dozens of media teams gathered outside the prison where she served nine years of a 15-year sentence. Corby was bundled into a police van and ferried under the heavy escort of more than 100 police to the prosecutor’s office where she was expected to sign the paperwork to finalise her release after serving nine years of her 15-year sentence.
Earlier, prison boss Farid Junaedi, arriving at the jail on Monday, said a letter from the authorities in Jakarta arrived on Sunday and that Corby would definitely be released. Under the terms of her parole, Corby, who is from the Gold Coast, must remain in Bali until 2017. She is expected to live initially with her sister Mercedes Corby and her Balinese brother-in-law Wayan Widiartha at their home in Kuta.
“We can’t confirm the time yet but it will definitely be today,” he said. Late last year, Widiartha reportedly paid the $13,875 fine imposed as part of Corby’s original sentence. He also wrote a letter promising that Schapelle would receive “support and guidance” upon her release and was reported to be in the prison van when she was taken from the jail on Monday.
It is more than nine years since the then-Gold Coast resident was arrested at the airport in Bali with 4.2 kilograms of cannabis. Corby is not obliged to stay with her sister but she must inform the corrections board of any change in address and report to the office every month.
Vice police chief of the Badung area, Agus Nugroho, said 106 officers would escort Corby from the prison. If she fails to present herself at the office more than three times in a row, notify authorities of a change of address or break any law, her parole will be revoked.
“This security is based on the request of the head of the prison,” he said. Today marks the first taste of freedom for Corby since customs officials caught her with 4.2 kilograms of marijuana stuffed into the bag of her bodyboard at Bali’s Ngurah Rai airport in 2004.
“Corby will come out from the main door of the prison and go straight to a car standing by.” Despite her repeated pleas of innocence and arguments by her defence team that the package was planted, Corby was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2005. The former beauty school student spent her late twenties and early thirties in the crowded and notorious Kerobokan jail but had been granted significant cuts to her original 20-year sentence.
Four police on motorbikes would escort Corby to the prosecutor’s office at Denpasar, he said. A total 30 months in remissions and a five-year sentence cut granted by the Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in 2012 made her eligible for parole.
Junaedi will give a media conference at 10am local time (1pm AEDT) on Monday. Stressing that parole is not an act of generosity by government but a “right governed by the law,” Indonesia’s justice and human rights ministry confirmed parole for Corby last Friday.
After Corby, 36, was released from jail it was expected paperwork and fingerprinting at the prosecutor’s office would take more than an hour. But facing political pressure from legislators and a vocal anti-narcotics group, justice minister Amir Syamsuddin refused to comment specifically about Corby’s case, saying only that the Australian woman had not received any special treatment.
The next stop would the corrections office, known as Bapas, where she would be interviewed further. Despite the significant cut in her sentence, prison has taken its toll. Corby has suffered from bouts of depression and received treatment for the condition at Denpasar hospital for several months in 2008, and again in 2009. When she applied to the Indonesian president for clemency, she said her life was at risk if she remained incarcerated.
Corby would then be free to go to the address she has nominated on her parole forms, the Kuta home of her sister Mercedes and brother-in-law Wayan Widyartha. During one bout of treatment, Corby was photographed in a nearby beauty salon with two guards but denied she was allowed to leave the prison for recreational purposes.
“I do not get days out surfing or nightclubbing,” she wrote in her book, My Story, published in 2006. “My whole existence is within this seedy little world. The beautiful world outside is becoming just a blur.”