AFP's Bali Nine actions 'imported death penalty into Australia'
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Version 0 of 1. Australian federal police imported the death penalty into Australia when they arranged for the Bali Nine to be arrested in Indonesia, the barrister who tipped them off said. Bob Myers said the AFP had all the evidence they needed to arrest the nine before they left Australia on a heroin smuggling mission. Instead, it let them travel to Bali and then told Indonesian police about the crime they were about to commit, Myers said. Related: Australian federal police to break silence over role in Bali Nine executions Bali Nine ringleaders Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were executed because the AFP betrayed its obligation not to expose Australians to the death penalty, he said. “They effectively imported the death penalty into Australian law by acting they way they did,” Myers told ABC radio on Monday. The AFP commissioner Andrew Colvin is due to face the media later on Monday to discuss the organisation’s role in the Bali Nine arrests. But Myers said he would not get an answer to the question he really wants posed: Why? “There’s not an answer. They’re going to try and say ‘to curry favour with the Indonesians, cooperation in terms of security and terrorism, alternatively sending a message to other young Australian kids’. Not one of those is a sufficient answer,” he said. Myers said that when he went to Bali in the wake of the arrests a decade ago, AFP officer Paul Hunniford, who was the AFP’s senior liaison officer in Bali at the time, told him it was “virtually inevitable that one or more of them was going to die”. The barrister said he regarded the AFP as effectively being the author of the men’s death warrants. It was Hunniford who wrote to Indonesian police to provide the Bali Nine’s names, passport numbers, and details of what they were planning. “If there is a suspicion that ... the couriers are carrying the illegal narcotics at the time of their departure, please take whatever action that you consider necessary,” the letter to Indonesian police said. Myers is a friend of the Bali Nine drug courier Scott Rush, who is serving a life sentence for his role in the heroin ring. Myers tipped off the AFP about the drug plot, after his friend, Scott Rush’s father Lee, called him, desperate for help to head off a crime he feared his son was about to commit. |