Former police community support officer Andrea Waldeck faces 16 years in Indonesian prison for drug-smuggling

British national Andrea Waldeck reads a bible as she sits in a courtroom in Surabaya, Indonesia (EPA)

A former Gloucestershire police community support officer who admitted drug-smuggling is facing 16 years in an Indonesian prison, if judges agree to prosecution demands.

Andrea Waldeck, 43, appeared before Surabaya District Court on Monday to be told that prosecutors were seeking a 16-year prison term and a fine of around £100,000.

The former PCSO with Gloucestershire Police had previously pleaded guilty to trafficking drugs worth more than £3,000 into Indonesia's second-largest city.

Waldeck, who worked for Gloucestershire Police until February 2012, could have faced the death penalty.

She was arrested in April after authorities found 52oz (1,472g) of methamphetamine crystals in her underwear at her hotel room in Surabaya, the capital of East Java province.

Waldeck, who has also lived in Rustington in West Sussex, said she was asked by her boyfriend, who lives in China, to take the drugs to a man in Indonesia.

In a Facebook profile which appears to have been set up by Waldeck in July, she said: "My new, very private profile for the friends and family I love and miss so much.

"Your support means the world to me. I'm so very sorry I've disappointed you all."

In another message posted on July 12, she said: "Can't change my name or delete pics from this phone or answer messages individually but only my fb friends can see this.

"Please don't worry this is Indonesia and some have prison staff as friends."

In August, grandmother Lindsay Sandiford, from Gloucestershire, lost her appeal against a death sentence for trafficking drugs into the resort island of Bali.

A three-judge panel at the Supreme Court in Jakarta unanimously rejected her appeal after agreeing with the decision taken by Bali's Denpasar district court.

The 57-year-old, from Cheltenham, was sentenced to death by firing squad after being found at Bali's airport with 10.6lb (4.8kg) of cocaine in the lining of her suitcase, worth an estimated £1.6 million, during a routine customs check after she arrived on the Indonesian island on a flight from Bangkok, Thailand, in May last year. She was sentenced in January.

Balinese police claim Sandiford, originally from Redcar, Teesside, was at the centre of a drugs-importing ring involving three other Britons.

But she denies the allegations, claiming she was forced to transport the drugs to protect her children, whose safety was at stake.

Under Indonesian law, Sandiford still has the opportunity to seek a judicial review of her case before appealing for a presidential pardon.

More than 140 people are on Death Row in Indonesia for drug crimes, a third of them foreigners.