Son joins French couple's appeal for bail

Alan Schmidt and Laurence Liegeois, the French couple awaiting extradition to France after a court order last week, have filed an application before the Criminal Curt of Appeal requesting bail.

Attached to Mr Schmidt's application was a sworn declaration by Michael Schmidt, his son, requesting that his father be granted bail.

In the declaration Michael Schmidt alleges that on the night of February 5, his father seemed to have suffered a stroke and 'only just escaped death'. Still, the medical staff at Mt Carmel Hospital only attended to him several hours later and they claimed that what he had suffered was 'probably been the consequence of a mixture of Fanta and Sprite that Alan Schmidt drank in the night during a hypoglycaemic episode to get his sugar levels back to normal.'

He said his father also suffered severe diarrhoea all night but was left to cope with the situation in a dark cell alone, despite being 98 per cent blind.

The fact that he shared toilet facilities with another inmate left him 'exposed to his fellow inmate', stripping Alan Schmidt of all human dignity, his son said.

The couple filed an appeal from their extradition on Friday.