Britains who were executed abroad

This British grandmother says she is ready to face the firing squad six years after being sentenced to death in Bali on drug smuggling charges British grandmother Lindsay Sandiford has given up her attempts to lodge a final appeal of her death sentence in Bali, saying she’s no longer scared of facing a firing squad.

The 62-year-old from Yorkshire has been on death row for six years after she was caught flying into the country from Bangkok with 10.16lb of cocaine in 2012.

Asked whether she feared execution by firing squad, she told the Daily Mail: “It won't be a hard thing for me to face anymore. It's not particularly a death I would choose but them again I wouldn't choose dying in agony from cancer either “I do feel I can cope with it. But when it happens I don't want my family to come. I don't want any fuss at all. The one thing certain about life is no one gets out alive.”

She says she wouldn't choose to die by firing squad, but that she will cope with it.

Lindsay met her granddaughter Ayla in death row in Bali.  As an aside,  my wife and I spent a week in the Island of Bali. When you arrive at the airport. there is a large sign that says, DRUGS BRINGS DEATH.

It means that Lindsay Sandiford forfeited her last chance of a potentially life-saving reprieve from Bali authorities, and joined the list of other Brits who have been executed abroad.

Here are some of the others…

Brian Barlow was wearing a blindfold when he was executed by hanging’  He was from Stoke-on-Trent, and Australian Brian Chambers, were the first Westerners to hang under Malaysia’s tough anti-drugs laws, which prescribe death for anyone convicted of having over 15 grammes of heroin in their possession.

The pair were arrested on the resort island of Penang in November 1983, with 180 grammes of heroin and were given mandatory death sentences.

Barlow, 28, who had dual British-Australian nationality, worked as a welder in Perth and 29-year-old Chambers was a building contractor in Sydney.

Despite appeals for clemency from the Australian and British Prime Ministers and Amnesty International, and a plea for a stay of execution, that was still pending in Penang High Court, when the two were hanged in July 1986.

Shortly before the execution, Chambers' mother said in a written statement: “No one has the right to take someone else's life. It's inhumane. There is no more to be said, but he will be free forever.”

The two men were led handcuffed up the few short steps to the wooden gallows of Pudu Prison just before 6 am, Speaking outside the prison, Karpal said the condemned men were blindfolded, their legs were bound and a noose was slipped around each man's neck in the presence of three witnesses - a doctor, a magistrate and the prison superintendent. Without warning, the lever to the trap door was pulled. The drop was approximately two feet so they suffered for some considerable time before they died.

Farzad' Bazoft’s execution in Iraq caused uproar around the world

British journalist Farzad was arrested in September 1989 after trying to discover the truth about a large explosion at a weapons complex 30 miles south of Baghdad.

A court in the Iraqi capital imposed the death sentence after convicting him of spying for Israel. A British nurse, Daphne Parish, who drove him to the site, was jailed for 15 years.

Farzad, who came to live in Britain from Iran when he was 16, had been invited by the Iraqi government to join a journalists’ trip to examine reconstruction work after the war with Iran after writing a number of articles on the Middle East for The Observer.

On the day he flew out, there were reports of an explosion at the Al-Iskandrai plant, said to be at the centre of Iraq's development of medium-range missiles, and The Observer commissioned him to write a report.

He was arrested at Baghdad airport, waiting for a flight back to London, and after six weeks in the Abu Ghraib prison, he was put in front of TV cameras and confessed to being an Israeli agent. He was probably tortured first.

Following a on-day trial behind closed doors, Farzad was convicted and hanged on 15 March 1990, aged 31.

He told a British envoy shortly before his death that he was "simply a reporter after a scoop".

There was international condemnation of the execution, but no surprise as Saddam Hussein's regime was becoming well known for its brutality.

Following Farzad 6.30am hanging.  the British ambassador to Iraq was ordered to leave and all ministerial visits cancelled. Months after the execution, Iraq invaded Kuwait, sparking the first Gulf War.

Nicolas Ingram spat in a warden's face just before he was executed.

Ingram had been on Death Row for 12 years before he became the first Briton to be executed in the United States.

Born in Cambridge to an English mother and American father, his parents moved to Cobb County, Georgia, when he was 11, and after they separated, he fell into drugs and crime.

In June 1983, Ingram murdered JC Sawyer and injured his wife, Eunice Sawyer, during a burglary by tying the couple to a tree before shooting them both. Amazingly, Eunice survived and testified against her husband's killer.

He was found guilty and sentenced to death on his 20th birthday.

Even though campaigners, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, pleaded for for clemency in Ingram's case, he was electrocuted on April 8, 1995, aged 31.

Defiant until the end, Ingram reportedly declined a final meal, spat at a prison warden when he was asked if he had any last words,   Hr replied,  "let's get on with it", A witness of the moment said that 2,000 volts surged through his body. “He shot back in the chair with a tremendous jolt. There was no smoke, no sizzle, no sign of movement, nothing."

His distraught lawyer, fellow Briton Clive Stafford Smith, told reporters as he entered the prison to witness his client's death: "What we are about to do is utterly, utterly barbaric."

He later said: "Nicky wasn't very good at speaking. He asked me to make a statement for him. He told me he hoped for something better now, because what had happened in this life had been so sad."

John Scripps would chop up the bodies of tourists he befriended He became the first Westerner to hang for murder in Singapore in April 1996 when he was executed for killing a tourist, South African Gerard Lowe, who he had befriended on arrival at the island state’s airport. After murdering him he then used butchery skills he had acquired while serving time in the Isle of Wight’s Albany Prison to surgically dissect his body.

Although he was only put on trial for oonly ne murder, the court heard how Scripps had also murdered and chopped up the bodies of a mother and son on the Thai resort island of Phuket. Police believe he may have killed others in Belize, Mexico and the United States.

Scripps would befriend his victims by posing as a tourist and striking up a conversation either aboard their flights or while waiting at airports, before going back to stay at the same hotel as them. Once he had an excuse to be in their rooms, he used an electroshock weapon to immobilise them before striking their heads with a hammer and cutting them up in their bathrooms.

A

fter he murdered Lowe he coolly treated himself to a steak dinner the the hotel where the killing had taken place, then booked tickets for a classical concert by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.

Scripps who was from  from Letchworth, Herts, in Englamd, he lived a life of petty crime and drug dealing which took him across the world, often to the heroin-growing areas of northern Thailand and Mexico.

At the time of the Thailand murders he had absconded from prison in Britain after failing to return after being granted home leave.

The 35-year-old was led out to the gallows with a black cloth sack covering his head and hanged, along with other condemned prisoners, just before dawn in April 1996.

His mother, Jean, said following his conviction: “How did I not know my own son? We’ll never be able to forget what a madman he turned into.”

Tracy Housel said he was "sorry from the very centre of my heart"  The Joint UK-US citizen Housel had spent 16 years on death row after being convicted of the 1985 rape and murder of a hitchhiker, Jeanne Drew, who he picked up at a truck stop in Winnett County, Georgia.

The 43-year-old was reported to have admitted as many as 16 other killings for which he had not been tried.

Born to American parents in Bermuda - hence his dual nationality - he returned with them to the US when he was three.

His execution came in March 2002 after then British PM Tony Blair had written to his lawyer expressing his hopes of a last-minute stay, and soon after foreign secretary Jack Straw phoned Georgia's governor in a failed bid to have the sentence commuted.

He ate a final meal of steak, baked potatoes and corn, followed by ice cream and a milkshake before being led in shackles to the execution chamber.

In a final statement, Housel said he was "sorry from the very centre of my heart”, before asking for two passages from the Bible to be read to him, including Psalm 23, the Lord Is My Shepherd. He was then executed by lethal injection in 2002.

Before his death, Housel said in an interview: "I believe in God and I believe in an afterlife, so I am not necessarily afraid of dying.

"It's a bizarre thing to know the exact date and minute of your death in advance and be totally powerless to stop it. I worry about how my actions have hurt others and constantly replay the events that led up to Jeanne Drew's death."

John Elliott's last meal was chocolate chip cookies and Earl Grey tea Elliott was the last Briton to be executed in the US after spending 16 years on death row.

Born in Felixstowe, Suffolk, where his father was a serviceman at a nearby US airbase, John ‘Jackie’ Elliott was brought up in a Texas where he became a gangster.

He was convicted of the gang-rape and murder of an 18-year-old single mother, Joyce Mungia, in Austin, the Texas capital, in 1986. But while he admitted he was at the scene, he claimed that another man who became a prosecution witness was the killer.

Elliott's defence team had attempted last-ditch appeals to both the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the US Supreme Court, arguing that new DNA tests could have proved that while Elliott was at the scene, he did not commit the crime, but failed on both occasions.

A last-ditch attempt by UK foreign secretary Jack Straw to have 42-year-old Elliott's punishment changed to a life sentence also failed.

He had a last last meal of chocolate chip cookies and Earl Grey tea before he was injected with a lethal dose of drugs in February 2003.

Elliott admitted he was scared of dying in an interview a month before his death, in which he said,  "I do believe there is an afterlife, but I'm not sure if I am qualified for it. I think about dying a lot now. It scares me. "I'm trying to prepare for it, try to read my Bible every day, but I just don't want to be lying on that gurney [trolley] and start crying."

Akmal Shaikh's family said he was mentally ill and duped into carrying drugs. H was a former London cab driver and father-of-five. He  was arrested in Urumqi, northwest China, after customs officers found four kg of heroin hidden in a compartment in his luggage.

His family said he had been duped into a carrying the suitcase that did not belong to him on a flight from Tajikistan.

An Anti-death-penalty organisation said it had medical evidence that delusional Shaikh believed a song he had written called ‘Come Little Rabbit’, was going to usher in world peace and make him a huge pop star.

The 53-year-old had traveled to China after being promised help with his music career, and was given a bag by a man who claimed to be in the music industry, unaware it contained drugs.

But despite repeated calls from his family and the British government for clemency he was executed in December 2009.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was "appalled and disappointed".

The condemned man’s daughter Leilla Horsnell said: "I am shocked and disappointed that the execution went ahead with no regards to my dad's mental health problems. That was an execution that shouldn’t have been done to this unfortunate man.