The remaining members of the Bali Nine have been escorted from Darwin to their home states by officers of the Australian Federal Police, the law enforcement agency infamous for their imprisonment for two decades in a foreign hell.
Smugglers Matthew Norman, Scott Rush, Michael Czugaj, Martin Stephens and Si Yi Chen left the Howard Springs Accommodation Village, near Darwin, where they spent the last four days after landing in Australia on Sunday.
Czugaj was seen boarding a plane to Brisbane early on Friday morning with a phalanx of heavily armed AFP officers trying to hide him from waiting media.
AFP officers reportedly threatened a journalist from The Australian with “additional measures” if photographs were taken inside the terminal, despite the fact that there is no law prohibiting this practice.
Ironically, it was the AFP who alerted their Indonesian counterparts to the group’s plans to smuggle 8.3 kilos of heroin from Denpasar airport to Australia in April 2005.
The infamous group ended up spending 20 years in an Indonesian cell, some of them with the death penalty hanging over their heads.
Czugaj, who was wearing dark glasses, a white face mask, a cap and a blue collared shirt, declined to speak to the media after landing in Brisbane.
He was seen walking arm in arm with a blonde relative who tried to push away the cameras as they left the airport.
Matthew Norman, Scott Rush, Michael Czugaj, Martin Stephens and Si Yi Chen will be reunited with their loved ones this Christmas (pictured: Martin Stephens, Michael Czugaj, Scott Rush, Matthew Norman and Si Yi Chen watch as Australia and Indonesia sign a agreement)
Czugaj (pictured during his 2005 trial) was seen boarding a plane to Brisbane early on Friday morning as heavily armed AFP officers attempted to hide him from waiting media.
“Where is dad’s car? Is dad’s the white one?” Czugaj was heard saying.
Meanwhile, Matthew Norman and Si Yi Chen reportedly arrived at Gate 10 of Melbourne Airport at 6.50am on Friday, where they were greeted by a small group of family members.
Neither of them told the media what they were waiting for.
Norman will move into a $4 million seafront mansion in the coastal town of Torquay, a major change from the squalid Bali prison cell he used to call home.
Martin Stephens flew to Sydney, where he was also assisted by AFP officers.
In 2005, Lee Rush, father of imprisoned Bali Nine member Scott Rush, contacted the Australian Federal Police to request that his son be prevented from leaving Australia, desperate to prevent him from becoming involved in any drug-related activity. .
The AFP passed this information on to the Indonesian authorities, who swooped on the group and arrested them at the airport.
Rush’s lawyer claimed in 2005 that the AFP had abandoned its promises to prevent the group from leaving Australia and instead allowed them to fly to a country they knew could execute smugglers.
Subsequent arrests at Bali’s Denpasar airport and elsewhere in Indonesia foiled the plot and ringleaders Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were sentenced to death. Both were executed by firing squad in April 2015.
Scott Rush (pictured left) with his father Lee Rush, who tipped off the Australian Federal Police about his son’s drug trafficking plot.
Scott and Lee Rush (also pictured at right, Scott’s mother Christine) talk in 2005, shortly after the arrest of the Bali Nine.
That same year, AFP denied moral complicity in that ruling, saying Indonesian authorities were acting based on more information about the group than simply the tip from the concerned father.
“I want to take the pressure off Scott Rush’s father,” the then AFP commissioner, Andrew Colvin, said in a press conference.
“It has been reported many times that his warning led to this. It wasn’t like that. I feel for Mr. Rush that he was portrayed that way.
“The AFP was already aware of and had begun investigating what we believed to be a syndicate that was actively recruiting couriers to import narcotics into Australia at the time of Mr Rush’s contact with the AFP.”
Commissioner Colvin also insisted there was insufficient evidence to arrest members of the Bali Nine before they left Australia, and that allowing them to travel exposed the syndicate as a whole.
«At that time we were working with a very incomplete image. “We didn’t know everyone involved, we didn’t know all the plans, we didn’t even know what the illicit product was,” Commissioner Colvin said.
He said it was “operationally appropriate” for the AFP to cooperate and seek help in Indonesia.
Pictured, top left to right: Myuran Sukumaran, Scott Rush, Tach Duc Thanh Nguyen, Renae Lawrence and bottom: Si Yi Chen, Matthew Norman, Michael Czugaj, Martin Stephen and Andrew Chan.
Commissioner Colvin said it was outside his jurisdiction to ask Indonesian authorities to allow drug couriers to fly back to Australia and arrest them there.
“This is the harsh reality for Australians who travel overseas and become involved in serious crime,” he said.
AFP Deputy Commissioner Michael Phelan then indicated that the AFP needed more information about the union in general.
“To allow them to return to Australia, we might have taken a couple of mules, but we wouldn’t have been able to have any evidence in relation to the syndicate as a whole,” he said.
However, Phelan admitted that he felt conflicted about handing over the information to the Indonesians.
“I’ve been agonizing over this for 10 years and every time I look back, I still think it’s a difficult decision,” he said.
“But given what I knew at that particular time, and what our officers knew, I would have a hard time convincing myself to make a different decision.
“I have seen the misery that drugs cause tens of thousands of families in this country.”
Phelan said he had no illusions about what the release of information might mean.
“Yes, I knew very well that by handing over the information and requesting surveillance and requesting evidence collected, if they were found in possession of drugs they would take action and expose them to the death penalty,” he said.
“I knew it, I went in with an open mind.”
Of the other Bali Nine members arrested in the original raid, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen died of cancer in 2018, while Renae Lawrence was freed that year after her life sentence was reduced to 20 years on appeal.