He said Novotny committed the crime at a very low age of 19 years. Klaus took into consideration the fact that Novotny has served a big part of the sentence in the conditions of a Thai prison. Klaus usually grants pardons for humanitarian reasons. Novotny was arrested at Bangkok airport in March 1995 with more than five kilograms of heroin that he tried to smuggle to Phnompenh, Cambodia. In July of the same year he was sentenced to 50 years in prison in Thailand.
About one year later, the sentence was commuted by 7.5 years in a Thai royal amnesty. Novotny and another convicted Czech drug smuggler Radek Hanykovics applied for relocation from Thailand to a Czech prison in 2002 on the basis of the Thailand calls for a rice cartel ...
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Jail for Burmese lorry survivors ... Czech-Thai agreement on the transfer of crime perpetrators and on cooperation in the exercise of criminal verdicts. Czech courts recognised the Thai sentences for both men who were transferred to the Czech Republic in 2004. A Prague court then upheld the rest of 34 years in prison for Novotny. His sentence was further commuted in further Thai royal amnesties. In February last year, when the Czech Constitutional Court rejected his application for shortening the sentence, he was to spend another 17 years in prison. Hanykovics died in January 2007 of lung cancer aged 37.
(Ceske Noviny)
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