Second Aussie man accused of smuggling drugs into Bali is identified - as new details emerge

An Australian man accused of smuggling drugs into Bali and potentially faces life behind bars has been identified.
Queensland man Puridas Robinson, 40, was arrested at a villa in West Denpasar last Thursday following an alleged tip-off from a co-accused accomplice.
Authorities arrested Indian national Harsh Nowlahka, 31, earlier in the day after he was allegedly found in possession of 600g of marijuana at Denpasar International Airport.
Bali National Narcotic Agency conducted further inquiries and has alleged that it was Robinson who ordered the narcotics.
Nowlahka allegedly told authorities he was supposed to deliver the drugs to Robinson's home, sources told Daily Telegraph.
Authorities followed Nowlahka to Robinson's villa, where officers allegedly uncovered a 104g stash of marijuana during a search of the property.
Robinson hasn't yet formally charged and has denied the allegations against him. He remains in custody.
He and Nowlakha were among five foreigners arrested as part of last week's investigation.
BNN spokesperson Made Dwi Saputra was tight-tipped regarding the allegations against Robinson, who is accused of drug trafficking and drug possession.
Mr Saputra told Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday night that more details would be revealed on Thursday.
'We will hold (a) press conference of some cases, including the Australian, tomorrow morning at 10am,' he said.
Robinson faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if he is found guilty of drug trafficking.
A drug possession conviction attracts a jail term of up to 12 years.
In Indonesia, marijuana is a Class 1 narcotic along with heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, LSD, and MDMA.
Robinson's arrest came days after a fellow Queenslander was arrested for alleged cocaine trafficking.
Lamar Ahchee, 43, was arrested in Canggu, a coastal village on the south-west coast of Bali, on May 22 accused of trafficking 1.8kg of cocaine worth $1.1m onto the tourist sland.
Police allege the Cairns man, who is the son of former Queensland senior constable Les Ahchee, collected two parcels of cocaine concealed in chocolate boxes, each containing 54 individual packets of the drug.
Ahchee has denied being a drug dealer and claimed that he was 'framed'.
Ahchee, a confessed drug addict, allegedly tested positive for drugs while in custody.
His lawyer Edward Pangkahila said Ahchee denied any involvement in drug trafficking.
'He's telling me that honestly, he doesn't know what was inside,'Mr Pangkahila said.
'We're still looking for that somebody who tell him to take this package.
'The police have to find this guy.'
Ahchee (pictured on Monday) is accused of trying to smuggle cocaine onto the island
Ahchee has not been charged but remained in custody since his arrest.
He faces the death penalty if convicted.

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Times

19 minutes ago

• Times

Sarah Champion: I'm called racist for taking on grooming gangs

Sarah Champion did not go into politics to wage war against child sex abuse rings or become a voice for vulnerable teenage girls preyed on by gangs of men of predominantly Pakistani origin who groomed, trafficked and raped them. When she became the Labour MP for Rotherham she did not know they existed. 'I had been running the local children's hospice as CEO when I became an MP in 2012 and I remember reading an article about this 15-year-old Rotherham girl who had a baby by any of three different men and was seen as a little scrubber, and I thought that's not right. Then a girl was found dead in a river, and they said she'd gone mad. Finally, a young white girl came to us with a poorly baby and her boyfriend was a much older Asian man; the relationship seemed odd.' Champion became increasingly uneasy that she did not know what was going on in her own constituency. 'At one of my first council meetings there was an item under 'risky business' and no one would explain it … Then I was in parliament and there was a session at a select committee on child sexual exploitation and Jayne Senior [a social worker] was giving evidence and it was horrifying, I felt mortified that no one seemed to care. Afterwards she suggested we meet on a canal boat in secrecy, and she told me what had been going on.' Slowly, survivors began to contact Champion. 'They were all ages. I met someone in her early eighties in Rotherham who described it happening to her by a Pakistani-origin man when she was younger. I met another woman at the back of Costa Coffee in her early twenties who went through everything in detail. Gradually I was collecting all this information, but I didn't know what to do.' Senior gave her a list of the men she had reported as abusers and the list of people she thought were complicit in the cover-up. 'I went to the police and people in the council saying I had serious concerns about a number of people, but I didn't get any responses. It was hard to know who to trust and I was nervous of giving away girls' names away. My life became one of shadows and pseudonyms.' • Baroness Casey: I feel rage on behalf of the abused girls This was not a race issue for Champion. 'To me this was just child abuse. It wasn't an ethnicity thing. The names weren't typically white English names, but what mattered was they were perpetrators of horrendous crimes. I'm a sloppy lefty to my core; I believe in equality and diversity. I just saw them as criminals.' The MP strongly believes Rotherham police, councillors and social workers should have called out these men as abusers decades ago. 'If they had taken these cases seriously when they began being reported in the 1960s, rather than telling these women they were silly young girls, then there wouldn't have been the boil of frustration there is now. The criminals would have gone to jail, the story wouldn't have escalated across the country, the Pakistani community wouldn't be vilified as though all of them are walking around intent on abusing white girls. They have done a massive disservice to this country.' In no way, Champion says, should these young girls be expected to take the blame. 'I remember when I was 15 and my friends and I were so excited when one of us got an older boyfriend with a car, some children are enamoured by older men, they like feeling special — before it all goes wrong — but we need to protect them.' The Labour MP stresses that she does not think this is about paedophiles. 'This is about pubescent girls aged 10 to 15 who are being groomed, they aren't little kids, and that is partly why it is overlooked as there is confusion over the age of consent, but it is 16 and for a reason.' • Gangs raped 'lost' girls because no one cared Watching these abused children struggle, as they grow up, has changed her mind about prostitution. 'I would make it a criminal offence for men to buy sex and decriminalise the women. I shifted my view largely because of the girls in Rotherham. When they were no longer pubescent and their value started to drop, they were so damaged and desperate, many were forced to turn to prostitution. They didn't have the capacity for consent, either because of the violence or drugs or alcohol. 'Once I'd been told about it, I would see it everywhere walking round Rotherham, I thought how can everyone else not see. Then I began reading reports round the country and thinking that's another grooming gang, yet none of them called them out.' She started to believe there was a pattern to cases being reported not just in Rotherham but Rochdale, Telford and Oxford. In 2017, after the conviction of a sex-grooming gang in Newcastle upon Tyne who were largely of Pakistani origin, Champion cracked. 'I did the BBC Today programme because I became so frustrated. They called the day before and I said I am going to say they are Pakistani gangs and they were very concerned. I went on and it was fine, there were no recriminations, just supportive messages. Then The Sun got in touch, and I wrote a piece for them. And all hell broke loose.' Champion had written: 'Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.' She quit as shadow equalities minister under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, apologising for the 'extremely poor choice of words in [the] article'. She initially claimed her piece had been edited and 'stripped of nuance' but a spokesman for The Sun, which is published by News UK, the parent company of The Times, said: 'Sarah Champion's column … was approved by her team and her adviser twice contacted us thereafter to say she was 'thrilled' with the piece and it 'looked great'.' Champion later said in an interview: 'What I'm really interested in is misogyny. It occurs in many different forms, but the most obvious forms are happening within some ethnic minority communities. I'm thinking female genital mutilation, forced marriage, honour-based violence and this type of child exploitation.' She was immediately branded a racist and for the past few years the abuse hurled at her from all sides has been relentless. 'It's the anniversary of [her fellow Yorkshire MP] Jo Cox's death next week, I was coming through the Tube yesterday and this guy clocked me and put his hand in his pocket and I thought he was going to stab me. You have to recalibrate your head and accept that it is inevitable that someone is going to kill you. It's quite liberating, I am a fatalist. I went through all the panicking and alarms and it eats you up so you just have to resign yourself. The MP David Amess was also a friend so I know what can happen.' • How the child sex grooming gangs scandal unfolded over 20 years Amess was killed in his Southend West constituency. Is it worth Champion risking her life to keep raising the issue of grooming gangs? 'No. But I can't help it.' Does she now wish she hadn't become an MP? 'I genuinely can't answer that. I have tried to become a voice for those who don't have one. But the personal toll? It's living hell. The violence and threat of violence has got marginally better, but it has been horrendous.' The proliferation of grooming gangs dominated by Pakistani-heritage men, she tells me, is like the Post Office scandal and the contaminated blood scandal. 'Everyone now knows but no one does anything. The Times has been amazing and a few others. Once you start getting really involved you can't stop because it is such a devastating story. But there aren't 20 people behind me saying, 'I will take the baton, you have a break now'. The sacrifices and compromises you make to do this aren't worth it for most people.' Does she still worry even now after Baroness Casey of Blackstock's 200-page report was published this week into grooming gangs that she will be seen as a racist for saying they are predominantly made up of men from Pakistani families? 'I think we can now say more, I wrote a letter to The Times this week using the words Pakistani heritage, but I still thought long and hard about doing that in case people misconstrued it.' She must find it hard that it took Elon Musk tweeting to get politicians to focus on the abuse again. 'I jokingly say I will dance with the devil if it gets the ultimate aim and that is the closest I have come to doing it. His intervention has promoted more discussion … But I get upset when the right uses what has happened to these girls as a political tool.' Many on the left have warned that people like her are stirring up racial tensions and the bigots will use it to hound ethnic minorities. 'Trying to hide what is happening isn't helping anyone. I had a Pakistani female constituent come to me because she had gone to the police about her husband who had been abusing young girls the same age as her children. She had then been completely ostracised by her community for bringing shame on them and was getting terrorised in her home and wasn't getting enough protection … They must live with these men. How those in authority think not dealing with the crime is helping the Pakistani community is mind-blowing to me.' New generations are also suffering, she says. 'I started getting young women coming very distressed because they were having their babies taken off them because social services had decided they were unfit mothers. They would tell me 'I think it is because my boyfriend is Pakistani, and the council is racist'. But it's almost the opposite. The council was afraid to call these men out and saw the victims as having made bad lifestyle choices.' Does she feel that this is as much a class problem as a race problem? 'I don't think it is just working-class girls who have been sucked in, but they are less likely to know how to raise their voices and get people to listen. I've sat with their mothers who say, 'What do I do? I can't chain my daughter up.' One of the groomers' methods is to divide families and get kids put into care so they are even easier prey. I know one parent who had the money and could send her child to a relative out of the region to break the cycle of abuse. So, if you have some cash, you have more options.' But many remain stuck with the perpetrators of their misery, living in the same town. 'One of the girls who first talked to me said that the same gang members were coming up to her with her 12-year-old and taunting her, saying, 'Your daughter is about ready now,' and she was freaking out.' What haunts Champion most is that this kind of horrendous abuse is still going on over a decade after she became MP and tried to raise awareness. 'This is not in the past tense, we are still dealing with these cases in isolation, but they must be linked they are so similar.'' In her epic campaign to get attention for the victims, Champion has felt very alone. 'Andrew Norfolk, the late Times journalist, and Jayne Senior have been my two staunchest allies. When this all broke again I still only had two MPs get in touch with me.' • Andrew Norfolk obituary: Times reporter who exposed grooming gangs I ask whether she misses Norfolk, who died last month. her eyes well up. 'I normally do 12 to 14-hour days here but when I found out he died I was floored. I came home at 10.30pm and I couldn't stop sobbing. He was the only one who I could just talk to about it all without fearing being accused of being racist. Neither of us wanted to be known for this. I'm seen by many as the racist Sarah Champion. It's awful. I'm the opposite.' She hasn't had any therapy or help. 'I trained as a shrink; I appreciate the value of it, but I am not at a point where I can unpack this because I have too much to do. Andrew and I would get in touch when we needed each other. It was the knowledge that there was someone who understood what was going on and didn't believe I was nuts.' Champion has no children of her own. 'That has helped, I have one step of separation,' she says. She doesn't feel angry just lonely. 'It's not helpful to be angry. I just feel deeply disappointed and frustrated and wanted people to be better. I want them to give their best and they aren't. They take the job title and don't give a shit. I don't know how they can turn a blind eye.' When Sir Keir Starmer agreed to a national inquiry this week, she was pleased but when she switched on social media, she saw she was being monstered from both sides. 'Either I have done too much or not enough, I'm now blamed by left and right. But I hope the inquiry can take up the challenge. It's important that they are going back over 800 cases. 'People in the UK are very tolerant, but at our core we want to see fairness. If something is seen as unfair, we start kicking off so the fact that the law wasn't applied here without fear or favour is a big issue; the fact that people paid to do a job failed to do it, and worse covered up abuse, that's a big issue.' Wherever Champion goes in the world now, people ask her about the grooming gangs, she says. 'Unless we are seen to be dealing with it, this smear is going to be on our country and our reputation for years.'

Daily Mail​

22 minutes ago

• Daily Mail​

Major development after baby girl injured in fire extinguisher prank that sent shockwaves around Australia

Two teenage boys have been charged after they allegedly sprayed a fire extinguisher into a car carrying a five-month-old baby and her father in Queensland. Aussie dad Leon and his baby, Pixie, were stopped at a red light in Sippy Downs on the Sunshine Coast, when the teens allegedly rode up on an e-bike and sprayed the fire extinguisher through the car's back window at 7.50pm on June 15. On Saturday, police announced that two teens from Buderim had been arrested over the incident. A 15-year-old boy was charged with 13 offences, including two counts of assault occasioning bodily harm. A 14-year-old boy was also charged with six offences, including two counts of wilful damage and assault occasioning bodily harm. Police will allege they had stolen the fire extinguisher from a nearby carpark on Courage Street earlier that night. Pixie was rushed to hospital where she had to have 100ml of saline solution put in her eyes to clean off the chemical powder. 'It was the most horrible scream I've ever heard in my life,' her mother, Tiffani Teasdale told 9News. 'I actually had to leave and one of the nurses had to come in and hold her down for me. She was covered in red rashes. Her eyes were pretty bloodshot. 'She was a little bit wheezy.' Pixie was discharged from hospital early on Monday with her mother urged to continue monitoring her symptoms. The fire extinguisher left a thick coat of chemical powder over the car's interior and destroyed Pixie's pram, toys and nappy bag. Footage shared to social media, which appeared to be shot from the balcony of a unit, showed two figures speeding along a Sunshine Coast street on Sunday night. One appeared to be facing forward steering the e-bike while the second was letting off a thick trail of gas behind them, which appears to be from a fire extinguisher. Ms Teasdale previously issued a furious message to the two alleged offenders. 'Just grow up,' she said. 'Take accountability for your actions. Hand yourself in. Stop terrorising the neighborhood.'

The Guardian

27 minutes ago

• The Guardian

Australia urged to press US to ‘act responsibly' as threat of nuclear disaster rises amid Israel-Iran conflict

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Ican) has described the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran as a 'terrifying reminder of how close the world remains to nuclear disaster', arguing Australia should condemn illegal military attacks and ratify the global treaty banning nuclear weapons. Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities violate international law, Ican has alleged, and could cause radioactive contamination with long-term consequences for human health and the environment. 'The prospect of radiation release, the erosion of non-proliferation norms, and the emboldening of nuclear-armed states to act without accountability – this is the deadly logic of nuclear deterrence playing out in real time,' said Gem Romuld, the Australian director of Ican, a Nobel prize-winning anti-nuclear group. 'We need urgent de-escalation and a return to diplomacy. Australia should press its allies, particularly the United States, to act responsibly and stop enabling this cycle of violence.' Israel, the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, is widely believed to be modernising its arsenal. It remains outside the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), but is estimated to have 90 nuclear warheads. Israel has never officially acknowledged that it possesses nuclear weapons. Israel has maintained its strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities are lawful and necessary to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons and using them in the future. The attacks were 'pre-emptive and precise strikes' against military targets, the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Brig Effie Defrin said. Iran, which had previously proposed a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, is a state party to the NPT but has now threatened to withdraw. The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, insisted Iran's nuclear programme was peaceful and that it sought an end to hostilities: 'Iran is ready to consider diplomacy once again – once the aggression is stopped and the aggressor is held accountable for the crimes committed.' Globally, the nuclear threat is growing. The decades-long trend of the number of dismantled warheads outstripping the deployment of new warheads – resulting in an overall year-on-year decrease in the global inventory of nuclear weapons – appears set to end: the pace of dismantlement is slowing, while the deployment of new nuclear weapons is accelerating. Figures released this week by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) show that of the 12,241 nuclear warheads globally, 9,614 remain in military stockpiles, and 3,912 are deployed on missiles and aircraft, with 2,100 kept on high operational alert. 'The era of reductions in the number of nuclear weapons in the world, which had lasted since the end of the cold war, is coming to an end,' said Hans M Kristensen, an associate senior fellow with SIPRI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme. 'Instead, we see a clear trend of growing nuclear arsenals, sharpened nuclear rhetoric and the abandonment of arms control agreements.' Since before winning office in 2022, Labor has committed to ratifying the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in government, but it has not yet done so. The government has argued it is 'considering the TPNW systematically and methodically as part of our ambitious agenda to advance nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament'. Globally, 94 countries have signed the ban treaty, and 73 have ratified it. No nuclear weapons states are party to the treaty.