A couple imprisoned in Bali for their part in a drug smuggling plot were caught brawling through the jail fences.
Julian Ponder, one of the masterminds behind the scheme, has now been banned from seeing girlfriend Rachel Dougall.
The couple, who have a flat in Eastern Terrace, Kemp Town, have a six-year-old daughter together who is understood to be living with Dougall’s mother in Preston Park.
Ponder was jailed for six years for drug possession and Dougall for a year for failing to report a crime after they were arrested in Bali.
A source told a national newspaper the pair had been caught fighting through the fence which separates the men’s and women’s blocks at Kerobokan jail.
Prisoners are allowed to talk through the divide, but a fight is believed to have broken out between the couple, with Ponder grabbing Dougall’s hair through the wire.
Ponder was also involved in a vodka-fuelled fight with his co-accused, Paul Beales.
The pair, who share a cell, have been told they will lose time off on remission because of the trouble.
Drinking vodka
Beales needed 12 stitches in his head after Ponder ripped a plank of wood from a door panel and attacked him, an inmate told the Mail on Sunday.
The prisoner said: “They had been drinking vodka smuggled into the prison all day when the row broke out.
“They are normally thick as thieves. No one knows what caused them to fall out.”
Dougall is due to leave the prison in the coming weeks after serving her year sentence for failing to report a crime.
Her father Barry, who lives in Haywards Heath, said: “I don’t know for certain when she will be back but I will be looking forward to seeing her.
Sentence appeal
“She’s very fortunate with her sentence, although we still don’t really know what her involvement in it all has been. To only serve a year it can’t have been much.”
One of the gang, drugs mule and grandmother Lindsay Sandiford, this week had her appeal against a death sentence rejected.
But the 56-year-old said she would rather die than get “old and decrepit” in an Indonesian jail.
Mr Dougall said: “Hearing that she would rather be executed and have it over with does make me worry about Rachel.
"But she knows there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve had a couple of phone calls from the Foreign Office who say she is coping.”
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