Two British men have been jailed in Indonesia after being found guilty of smuggling cocaine into the holiday island of Bali.
Kial Garth Robinson, 29, of Littlehampton, was sentenced to 11 years in prison, while Piran Ezra Wilkinson, 48, from Chichester, received a nine-year term. The sentences were handed down on Thursday 26th February by a court in Denpasar, Bali.
Both men were ordered to pay a fine of around £45,000 or serve an additional 190 days in prison if the fine is not paid.
Robinson was arrested in September last year at Ngurah Rai International Airport after customs officers discovered two packages containing 1.3kg of cocaine in his backpack.
Robinson told police he had been instructed by a man named Santos to transport the drugs from Barcelona, Spain, to Bali, and deliver them to Wilkinson, who had arrived a few days earlier.
Wilkinson was arrested the following day in Canggu, on the south coast of Bali.
Prosecutors said the two men were friends who lived in Thailand and had met in Barcelona a week before their arrests.
Robinson’s lawyer, Robert Khuana, said after sentencing: “These items were brought from Barcelona to Bali, but they aren’t meant for distribution. My client was purely a courier, but he knew he was trapped in a syndicate scenario and was persuaded with $5,000 and another $5,000 for debt repayment and he was therefore willing to bring the drugs to Bali. What made the sentence harsher was that his actions threatened the security against drug distributions in Indonesia. Although he didn’t know the contents of the package, he knew the contents were dangerous. If he had known, he wouldn’t have done what he did.”
The UK Foreign Office said: “We are providing assistance to two British nationals detained in Indonesia and are in contact with the local authorities.”
Indonesia has some of the world’s strictest anti-narcotics laws, with drug trafficking punishable by death in severe cases. The country has maintained a moratorium on executions for several years, but dozens of traffickers remain on death row. Indonesia last carried out executions in 2016, when one Indonesian and three Nigerian drug convicts were executed by firing squad.
Both men had faced charges under Indonesia’s Article 113 drug laws that could have carried the death penalty, but the court imposed lengthy prison terms instead.
In a separate case last July, three British nationals from Sussex were sentenced to 12-month terms for smuggling 994g of cocaine disguised as packets of Angel Delight. Lisa Stocker, 39, and Lisa’s husband, Jon Collyer, 38, were arrested at Bali’s international airport in February 2025, and Phineas Float, 31, was arrested shortly after as the intended recipient. They were eligible for release in early 2026.
Under President Prabowo Subianto’s administration, Indonesia has in recent months repatriated several high-profile inmates convicted of drug offences to their home countries, often on humanitarian grounds or through bilateral agreements.
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