An airport search in Dhaka began a four-year journey through detention, false reports of execution, a death sentence, an appeal and a diplomatic campaign. Lesedi Molapisi is now free, but her case leaves Botswana with difficult questions about justice, mercy and the death penalty.
At about 5.30pm on Sunday, January 23, 2022, Lesedi Molapisi walked through the green channel at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She had arrived on a Qatar Airways flight from South Africa, travelling through Doha.
Customs officers, working with Bangladesh’s National Security Intelligence, stopped the then 30-year-old Motswana and scanned her trolley bag. The scan revealed powdery and granular material. Officers opened the luggage and found eight plastic bags containing 3.145 kilogrammes of heroin, then valued by authorities at about 20 crore Bangladeshi taka (about P22 Million).
She was arrested, and the following day an assistant customs officer filed a case at the Airport Police Station under Bangladesh’s Narcotics Control Act.
That airport search began a chain of events that would keep Molapisi in custody for more than four years, separate her from her family, place her under a sentence of death and twice force her father to deny reports that she had already been executed.
On September 1, 2026, exactly 1,682 days after her arrest, the Botswana Government announced that Molapisi had been released from prison following a grant of clemency.
According to the Government statement, President Duma Boko appealed for executive clemency and commutation of her death sentence, and Bangladesh granted clemency.
To understand the weight of the announcement, return to the days before Molapisi’s arrest. Her father, Goitsemodimo Molapisi, later said she had been unemployed and staying with her elder sister in Gaborone. She visited her parents in December 2021 and left around January 18, 2022.
After learning of the arrest, her father searched her belongings and found a letter connected to her business visa application. According to accounts of the document, it said she intended to travel to Bangladesh to buy ready-made garments for resale and that accommodation would be arranged for her.
Bangladeshi investigators did not accept that explanation. On January 26, police arrested Mohibul Islam Masud, the managing director of a Dhaka company that investigators said had invited Molapisi into the country. On August 17, 2022, an investigating officer filed a charge sheet against Molapisi and Masud, alleging that they were members of an international drug-smuggling syndicate.
The charge sheet said Molapisi had received three handbags from a Johannesburg-based friend identified as Evans Chukaka before travelling. It alleged that heroin had been concealed inside the bags. Investigators said they could not establish Chukaka’s address or find firm evidence against him, and he was not charged. They also said Molapisi had failed to provide suitable evidence supporting the stated business purpose of her trip.
At that stage, they were allegations before a court rather than findings of guilt. What was beyond dispute was that Molapisi remained detained in a foreign country whose laws allow the death penalty for serious drug offences.
Before her trial had even begun, misinformation brought death to her family’s door. Molapisi appeared in court on November 14, 2022. Ten days later, reports circulated in parts of the African media and on social platforms claiming she would be executed on November 25, or had already been hanged.
Her defence lawyer, Chamon Afroza, told Bangladesh’s The Daily Star that the reports were completely false. She said Molapisi’s trial had not started. The newspaper traced no reliable source for the execution story, yet the claim had already crossed borders and reached a family struggling to obtain clear information.
Goitsemodimo complained at the time that the family had received little help from Botswana authorities. Ditshwanelo, the Botswana Centre for Human Rights, called on Government to intervene and warned that secrecy surrounding executions made false reports especially cruel and difficult to disprove.
Little emerged publicly about the court proceedings during 2023. What became clear on May 27, 2024, was the outcome. Additional Metropolitan Sessions Judge Md Aminul Islam in Dhaka convicted Molapisi of drug smuggling and sentenced her to death.
The rumours of 2022 had suddenly been replaced by a real judgment carrying the possibility of execution.
Then President Mokgweetsi Masisi said Botswana would do everything permitted by law to save her life. He promised that Government would help finance an appeal and provide counselling and support to the family. Ditshwanelo welcomed that commitment, while Molapisi’s family placed its hopes in the appeal process.
On June 5, 2024, a coalition including Amnesty International, Ditshwanelo, the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network, the Capital Punishment Justice Project, the International Federation for Human Rights and Odhikar called for her sentence to be commuted. The organisations argued that international human-rights standards restrict capital punishment to the “most serious crimes”, understood as offences involving intentional killing, and not non-violent drug crimes.
They pointed out that Bangladesh law gave the authorities routes to commute a death sentence. They also called for competent legal representation and raised concern about conditions faced by people held on death row.
Molapisi’s lawyers lodged an appeal, but there was no quick hearing. Political upheaval in Bangladesh during 2024 added another layer of uncertainty. Her father said he did not know when the appeal would be heard, although he remained hopeful that she would survive and return home.
In March 2025, the same nightmare returned. Social-media posts again claimed that Molapisi had been executed or was due to be hanged on March 21. This time she was a convicted prisoner under an actual death sentence, making the false claims more believable and more painful.
Botswana’s High Commissioner to India, Gilbert Mangole, said on March 19 that he had received no information about an execution. He confirmed that the legal team had filed an appeal and was waiting for a hearing date, a process he said could take close to two years. Diplomatic discussions about a pardon were also under way.
Molapisi’s father said he spoke to her every Friday through her lawyer. She was alive and physically healthy, he said, but suffering from depression after more than three years in prison. He pleaded with people to stop spreading false news and said the first thing he would do after her return was take her for professional counselling.
By then Botswana had changed governments. President Boko’s administration continued the effort, intensified the clemency campaign and pushed the case through diplomatic channels. The September 1 statement said Boko personally appealed for executive clemency and commutation of the sentence.
Minister of International Relations Phenyo Butale engaged Bangladesh’s former interim leader, Muhammad Yunus, and Foreign Affairs Minister Khalilur Rahman. Botswana’s diplomatic missions in India and South Africa dealt with Bangladeshi authorities and helped provide consular support. Government also worked with local and international human-rights organisations, including Ditshwanelo, to secure legal representation.
The result was the announcement that Molapisi had been freed. Botswana thanked Bangladesh and described the outcome as evidence of strong cooperation between the two countries.
The case also leaves Botswana facing an uncomfortable contradiction. It asked another country to show mercy while retaining and using the death penalty at home. Amnesty International highlighted that conflict in 2025. Bangladesh sentenced Molapisi for a drug offence, while Botswana’s death penalty is principally associated with murder and other grave offences, but the central question is the same: whether the state should possess an irreversible power to take life.
