JAKARTA: With Taiwan having become a major supplier of narcotics to Indonesia in recent years, seven Taiwanese drug dealers have been sentenced to death and three others have been shot dead by police since 2015.
At present, there are approximately 4.5 million drug users in Indonesia, including 1.2 million classed as “heavy addicts,” making it the largest drug market in Southeast Asia, according to statistics compiled by the Indonesian authorities.
Most of the narcotics in Indonesia have been smuggled into the country, and officials at Indonesia’s National Narcotics Agency have identified China and Taiwan as the two main foreign sources of drugs.
Drug dealers from Taiwan have been targeted in anti-narcotics raids, along with others from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Nigeria, the agency said.
In the latest case, a Taiwanese man suspected of drug dealing was shot dead by Indonesian police in a Jakarta suburb on March 1 after trying to resist arrest. He was the third Taiwanese national to be shot dead in anti-drug operations in Indonesia in five months.
In November 2016, Indonesia’s Supreme Court upheld the death penalty for three Taiwanese men who were convicted in 2015 of smuggling 2 kilograms of amphetamine into the country from Hong Kong.
Another four Taiwanese nationals, meanwhile, were sentenced to death by a district court in Jakarta in August for possession of 26kg of amphetamine.
Currently, more than 30 Taiwanese nationals involved in drug-related offenses are jailed in Jakarta and Central Java, according to Indonesian authorities.
