IT was 2.59pm. Customs officer, I Gusti Ngurah Winata, was working at conveyor belt B inside Bali’s Ngurah Rai International Airport.

He had been at work already that day for two hours. He was out the back operating the machine, X-raying the luggage of passengers arriving in Bali from overseas.

At that particular time, it was the bags from Australian Airlines Flight number AO7829, from Sydney. For the most part it was routine, nothing seen.

But then a boogie board bag came through. The claim tag said QF884193.

In the job for 20 years, Mr Winata was accustomed to the sizes and shapes of luggage bought on holiday to Bali by tourists. Boogie boards and surfboards were regular.

But something about this particular blue boogie board bag looked different. The shape was maybe different. And the x-ray machine showed an orange colour, which normally indicated some kind of vegetation or organic matter. Sometimes clothes even showed up this colour on the x-ray monitor.

Mr Winata’s sixth sense kicked in. Things were not right. His radar was on. Instinct. He wanted to check it out, to find out what was in the bag.

So instead of putting a chalk X on the bag, a note for officers on the customer side of the airport to check the bag’s contents, Winata decided to do away with the marking and instead secretly and discretely follow the bag itself on to the carousel and watch who collected it. He feared the X might scare off the owners who may then ditch it and run away.

Winata watched as Schapelle Corby’s brother, James Kisina, carried the bag and the group — Corby and her two friends Alyth McComb and Katrina Richards, went into the “nothing to declare” lane of Customs.

Their two weeks of fun in Bali was beckoning. Once they got through Customs they would be on their way to their hotel and then to meet up with Corby’s sister Mercedes, who was turning 30 and about to host a big party.

They could barely wait. Alyth and Katrina went through first. Alyth had told Kisina to help his sister with the luggage as she struggled with her suitcase and the boogie board bag. So Kisina grabbed the boogie board bag. Corby was annoyed, the bag’s handle had been slashed. And the zips were done up in the middle. She never zipped the bag this way, it was always on the side.

Alyth and Katrina were already outside waiting for the siblings to come through.

Shocking find

Winata approached Kisina and asked to check the bag. Corby interrupted. “That’s mine”, she said. Winata checked the name tag. It said Schapelle Corby. Winata says he asked Corby to open the bag and she opened a small front pocket, telling him: “It’s empty, nothing.”

Winata asked to check the bag. What happens next has always been hotly disputed. Winata insists his version, given to court and police, is the truth of what happened that afternoon. Corby and her family say it’s a lie.

Winata wanted the big zip opened. He says she appeared nervous and tried to stop him from opening the bag, shouting no at him. He asked why. “I have some …” Winata says Corby told him. He says Corby told him it was marijuana, she knew from the smell that had wafted from the open bag.

Corby angrily disagrees, saying Winata is lying. He didn’t ask her to open the bag, she did that on her own, she didn’t push his hand away. She was not suspicious or nervous.

And at no stage, she says, did she ever admit to owning the marijuana in the bag that day. A second Customs officer, Komang Gelgel, said she did.

The boogie board bag, with its stash, Corby and Kisina were taken into a Customs room for further investigations.

Two vacuum-sealed bags had been used to store the 4.2kg of high quality marijuana, shaped like a pillow case and nestled neatly and almost precision like against the boogie board. Like it was shaped to fit there. A rapid test was done and a drug dog brought it. It was certainly marijuana and good quality at that.

Corby was shocked, running her hands through her hair and burying her head in her hands.

Winata was shocked too. It was so much marijuana. It was the biggest haul he had been involved in and the first coming from Australia.

Drugs coming into Bali were more likely to come from Thailand.

To this day Winata insists he was not lying about anything and that everything happened exactly the way he said in his first statement and in his court testimony.

Why would he lie? What would be the benefit to him of lying? He keeps asking that.

And he cares little that Corby and her team publicly called him a liar in court. He shrugs his shoulders now. Defence lawyers are paid to defend clients. No problem for him. The lawyer wasn’t there that day, he was, and he knows what happened.

Call for help

Across town, Mercedes was getting annoyed. Her Balinese husband Wayan Widyartha had gone to the hotel where her siblings and friends were staying to pick them up and bring them to the villa she had rented. They weren’t there.

Mercedes rang the hotel but they hadn’t checked in. Dopey. Schapelle must have given her the wrong hotel details. She’d have to wait for them to call her now.

When a call did come through it was from a distressed Katrina Richards.

Mercedes rushed to the Customs office where the group had been taken.

Her legs almost collapsed beneath her when she walked into a Customs room and saw the enormous bag of marijuana. Schapelle had her head in her hands.

Mercedes had no feeling for a bit and then she snapped into action, shouting at the officials to stop touching the marijuana and the plastic bags, putting their fingerprints all over everything. By then it was too late. So many hands had touched it.

“4.2kg of marijuana in airport. The smuggler is a beautiful woman from Australia”. So read the headline of Radar Bali newspaper, accompanied by a photograph of Corby after her arrest, head resting on her right hand. The photo caption said “Cantik”, beautiful.

The local media was playing up Corby’s beauty. The average drug smuggler to Bali at that stage fitted a different profile altogether. This was novel.

“Bali is tempting. Including tempting people to bring narcotics to this beautiful Island of Gods … As many as 4.2kg of dry marijuana has been foiled by Customs officers at Ngurah Rai International airport yesterday afternoon,” the paper said in its intro.

“The bearer of the marijuana is Australian, Schapelle Leigh Corby, 27. The beautiful woman arrived in Denpasar with three friends,” it went on, describing the way the marijuana was stashed in the bag as reckless. The smell of the drug had made Customs officers dizzy.

Soon after the arrest, Customs issued a press release, telling how the marijuana was found inside a bag containing a boogie board and flippers.

And if anyone was in any doubt this was serious, the Customs press release set it out. The sentence for this crime was the death penalty, a life sentence or 20 years in jail.

— Additional reporting Komang Erviani in Bali and Lukman S. Bintoro

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