Aug. 5: Ayodhya Prasad Chaubey was shot dead by a police firing squad in Indonesia, nine years after he had been sentenced to death for drug smuggling.

The execution of the 67-year-old Indian national, who had been operating out of Thailand and was arrested in 1994, came on the day Delhi announced that Dhananjoy Chatterjee’s mercy plea had been rejected by the President. Convicted of raping and murdering a schoolgirl in Calcutta, Dhananjoy was sentenced to death by hanging in 1991.

“It has been done, before dawn around 2.00 am (1900 GMT Wednesday). It was carried out under the authority of the prosecutors. Our men were the executioners,” Indonesia police spokesperson Paiman said today.

In an interview with a television channel a day before his execution that was broadcast, Chaubey said he did not deserve the death penalty and alleged there were problems with the evidence presented by police.

The Indian embassy said in a statement it would not comment on the legal aspects of the case but that it had requested reconsideration of an appeal by the convicted man.

“We could only manage to delay the death penalty, we could not get a pardon for him,” an official said.

India had been trying to get Chaubey’s sentence commuted to life imprisonment, pleading that the same crime does not carry the death penalty in the country. But Indonesia said its law would prevail on its soil.

Embassy officials were informed only after the execution had been carried out.

Chaubey, who hailed from Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, had been living in Thailand for a long time and was cut off from his family in India. He had a wife and two sons, but one of his sons is dead. Chaubey married again in Thailand.

Recently, the convict on death row had asked to meet his Indian family and embassy officials. The officials met him and the embassy tried to track down his family. But his wife was too ill to travel and the other relatives were not keen to visit him.

The execution in the North Sumatra capital of Medan ends a three-year gap in carrying out the death penalty in Indonesia. The penalty was last carried out in 2001, when two men convicted of multiple murders were executed.

Kemas Yahya Rachman, a spokesperson for the attorney-general’s office, said over phone from Medan that Chaubey was executed by a team of 12 policemen from an elite paramilitary unit.

“He was buried about three hours later at a Muslim cemetery…. He was buried according to Muslim rites at his own behest,” Rachman said.

Chaubey had converted to Islam, hoping that it would help him get pardon in the country with the world’s largest Muslim population.

The SCTV video of Chaubey on what was purported to be his last night alive showed the prisoner decrying his sentence. “We are only ordinary human beings. We only live once,” he said, according to SCTV subtitles on the poor quality video.

He had been sentenced to death for smuggling 12 kg of heroin into Indonesia.

The execution came despite an appeal from the European Union, issued on Wednesday. It follows pledges by President Megawati Sukarnoputri, locked in a tough election battle, to get tough on drugs traffickers.

Megawati, who faces elections this year, has vowed to get tough in the war on drugs, and the courts have handed down a handful of death sentences on convicted drug felons, most of them foreigners.