Indonesia has released a 14-year-old Australian boy convicted of drug possession on the resort island of Bali after two months' detention.
"Earlier, the process of taking fingerprints ... processing release documentation, taking photographs was completed," Bali's Kerobokan prison chief Siswanto told reporters on Sunday.
"He is now free."
The boy has been in custody since October 4, when he was arrested after police caught him with 3.6 grams of marijuana, which he later confessed to buying from a dealer on Kuta Beach.
A district court on November 25 handed the boy a two-calendar-month jail sentence for marijuana possession, deducting the eight weeks the boy had already spent in detention from his jail term.
"Legally, my client is free at one minute past midnight on Sunday morning," the boy's lawyer Muhammad Rifan told AFP.
But the boy must make a stop at Bali's Kerobokan prison to get fingerprints taken and finalise paperwork before he is handed to immigration at Denpasar airport, Rifan said.
"There's no staff at the prison at midnight, so the boy and his family are staying at the detention centre tonight, and he will go to Kerobokan and then the airport in the morning," Rifan said.
Prosecutors had sought a three-month jail term for the boy under a drug possession charge that carries a maximum of two years' imprisonment for minors, saying that the boy was young and likely to change his ways.
The defence had tried to have him acquitted under separate articles of the narcotics law that state minors with a documented history of drug use can evade prison and undergo rehabilitation instead.
Their case centred on evidence provided by an Australian doctor and New South Wales state police, as well as testimony from a local psychiatrist who had assessed the boy since his detention.
The boy admitted to carrying 3.6 grams (quarter of an ounce) of marijuana when he was arrested on October 4 in the tourist area of Kuta, where he was on holiday with his parents.
Several Australians have been arrested for drug possession on Bali in recent years, including two traffickers on death row and six serving life sentences in Kerobokan prison.
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