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Unlike many passengers on a flight jetting out of Bali today, one exhausted traveller will rejoice as they leave the paradise island . Amid the holidaymakers and partygoers, an elderly woman in poor health will take her seat and say a silent prayer as the aircraft leaves the runway. Because Lindsay Sandiford has not been enjoying the white sands of Indonesia's luxury resort - she has spent 13 years living under the threat of execution in one of the worst prisons in the world. Her reprieve for smuggling £1.6 million of cocaine into the country was finalised in a bilateral agreement after months of behind-the-scenes negotiations by UK Government authorities. It was the personal plea from Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper t hat finally secured her freedom, freeing her from the death penalty in a country which has some of the harshest drug laws on the planet. Now Sandiford, 69, is scheduled to leave Bali in the dead of night, just after midnight in Indonesia, from the same airport where she was snared more than a decade ago. It is the same terminal where she was dressed in orange garbs and paraded before the media with blocks of the Class A drug piled on a table before her as gleeful Indonesian authorities toasted her arrest. Last year I went inside Kerobokan jail where Sandiford has languished ever since. Behind the razor-wired walls of the imposing prison, I saw the cramped conditions where not only liberty is lost, so too is privacy and peace. In a crammed jail there is a constant jostling for space. Announcements blare incessantly from loudspeakers, testing sanity. For her part, Sandiford has survived as best she could, earning the nickname "Grandmother" while teaching others to knit. But far worse than the physical horrors of her confinement is the relentless fear of a trip to Indonesia's infamous Nusa Kambangan - known as "Execution Island". Sandiford will no doubt have been told of the carefully orchestrated execution that awaited her. Frogmarched from her Bali cell in the dead of night and flown to Yogyakarta, she lived terrified of the five-hour journey through the villages of Central Java before being loaded onto a Government vessel to the island. Sandiford, shackled at her hands and feet, anticipated being taken from her cells at midnight to face her death. Deep in the woods - in a "death zone" known as Nirbaya - blindfolded Sandiford was due to be dressed with a white apron around her neck and a red target on her chest. She would have been asked if she had any final requests, before being lined up in front of a group of shooters - only three with live ammunition - and shot dead. But instead of the barbaric ending, by this time tomorrow she will be staging a tearful reunion with her loved ones, family members who have never given up hope that she could be spared the firing squad. Whether she will be immediately freed or held by the authorities in the UK when she touches down at London Heathrow Airport is yet to be seen. What is crystal clear is that Sandiford has served her sentence and paid the price for her crimes. She deserved to be returned to the UK where she can access the medical attention she so desperately needs. And she has earned the right to move on from a haunting 13-year stay in a prison chillingly referred to as Hotel K.
