A NORTH-EAST grandmother caught smuggling cocaine in Bali has been told she could be executed as early as next month.

Lindsay Sandiford, originally from Redcar, was handed a letter from Indonesian prosecutors on Tuesday, informing her of her fate, it has emerged.

The mother-of-two was told she will be shot by firing squad unless she urgently files papers for a final legal appeal against her sentence.

However she has no lawyer or money to pay to the £50,000 cost of contesting her death sentence and the British Government has refused to pay.

Mrs Sandiford is reported to have told relatives: "Time is running out for me. The whole thing is surreal. I just can’t believe it is happening."

Former Director of Public Prosecutions Lord Ken Macdonald has called on the British Government to intervene immediately and fund a lawyer for Sandiford. He said: "If the British Government opposes the death penalty as it says it does, it should put its money where its mouth is and help this woman."

However Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond is standing firm on his refusal to fund her legal fight, despite a recommendation to do so by five Supreme Court judges in London who voiced concerns over the way her case had been handled and disparities between sentences for similar crimes.

Sandiford admitted smuggling £1.6m worth of cocaine into Bali from Thailand in 2012 but claims she was pressured into trafficking the drugs by threats made to the lives of her sons by a drug trafficking gang.

The grandmother, who lived in London and then Cheltenham after leaving Redcar, is pinning her hopes on her sister Hilary Parsons' attempts to raise money and help in Australia through anti-death penalty charities and lawyers. Mrs Parsons said: "It’s all day, every day, trying to get help for her and just hoping that the worse doesn’t happen."

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: "We will continue to raise the subject with the Indonesians. We are closely following Lindsay Sandiford’s case. She had regular contact with British consular officials in Bali until September 2014, at which point she declined to accept any further support."