Original Story DRUGS Royal pardon for Australian trafficker Australian drug trafficker Lyle Doniger has been granted a royal pardon after serving only six years of a 50-year sentence in a Bangkok prison, officials said in Canberra yesterday. Doniger, 50, has already been released from the Bang Kwang maximum security prison and was expected back in Sydney by the end of this week. ``Mr Doniger has been extremely fortunate to receive a royal pardon as they're rarely given,'' a foreign affairs spokeswoman said. ``We warn Australians against using or trafficking in illicit drugs, especially overseas.'' Doniger was arrested with two Australian women, Jane McKenzie and Deborah Spinner, in March 1996 at Don Muang airport as they travelled home after a week in Thailand. A search revealed they had secreted 115 grammes of heroin in condoms inside their bodies. Their penalty under Thai laws should have been a mandatory life sentence, but the court took into account their guilty pleas and reduced the sentence to 50 years each. McKenzie and Spinner, held in the women's section of Klong Prem jail, were not released because they did not apply for a pardon when Doniger made his application two years ago. Until the unexpected pardon, the only hope for the three, and other Australian prisoners in Thailand, was that they might have been transferred to an Australian jail to serve out their time under a treaty signed by Thailand and Australia last year. However, legislative arrangements to implement the treaty are still being completed by the two countries. Doniger, a father of three children living in Sydney, had to share a cell five metres by 10 metres with 23 other men. Interviewed in prison for The Age, a Melbourne newspaper, earlier this year, Doniger said his children would not know him any more. ``What do you say to a child you haven't seen for six years?'' he said then. ``The day before I came here I went over and read them bedtime stories. Now they are in high school.'' _ AFP
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