Australian mine workers arrested in Indonesia after drugs discovery
Singapore: Two Australian men are facing up to 12 years in an Indonesian prison after being caught with methamphetamine and syringes while working at one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines.
The men, aged 46 and 44, have been detained by police in the contested West Papua region, the easternmost corner of the Indonesian archipelago.
One of the Australian men detained by police in Papua.
They had been working for an Indonesian contractor on the giant mine in the district of Mimika.
I Gede Putra, the Mimika police chief, told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that officers had found nine syringes and an empty plastic sachet in the room where one of the men was living in the town of Tembagapura. A subsequent search of the other Australian’s room uncovered seven small plastic bags containing powder suspected to be methamphetamine, police said.
Authorities have not released their names but the main have held in custody at the Mimika police station since the raids on June 28 and face between four and 12 years in jail if convicted.
The men had been working for five and seven years respectively for Redpath Indonesia, a subcontractor to Freeport Indonesia, which operates the mine, and police said they had been consuming methamphetamine during the previous year.
The mining workers have been held in police custody since June 28.
The drugs were found in the residential area for workers at the mine, which is located in a mountain range at 4267 metres above sea level and has the world’s largest gold reserve and among the biggest copper deposits.
Indonesia has notoriously strict drugs laws including lengthy prison terms for possession of illegal substances.
Australian model Michelle Leslie famously spent three months in jail in Bali in 2005 after being sprung with two ecstasy pills on the way to a dance party on the island.
More recently, Melbourne nightclub promoters William Cabantog and David Van Iersel spent a year and nine months in Bali’s Kerobokan jail respectively after being convicted in 2019 for using cocaine.
A view of the Grasberg mine in Indonesia.Credit:AFP
Since detaining the two Australians in Papua three weeks ago, police said they had also arrested a self-employed man from South Sulawesi and a Papuan civil servant over the supply of the drugs.
The police chief said the Australian embassy in Jakarta had been notified of the arrests of the two men, who operated jumbo drilling rigs in Grasberg’s underground block cave mine.
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was contacted for comment.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s government has a 51 per cent stake in the mine after a $US3.85 billion ($5.6 billion) deal in 2018 when it assumed majority control from American mining giant Freeport McMoRan and bought out Rio Tinto’s 40 per cent share.
The site has long been the subject of controversy in Indonesian Papua, where separatists have waged a low-level insurgency for decades and have been angered by foreign exploitation of the resource-rich territory. A 2017 report by Indonesia’s Supreme Audit Agency also concluded Freeport’s operations in Papua’s highlands had led to $13.25 billion in environmental damage.
Attempts to reach Redpath Indonesia, the employers of the Australian men, were unsuccessful.
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