A former on-board agent caught the smuggling of more than 100 pounds from a new fatal synthetic drug in human bones faces 25 years in a Sri Lankan prison.
Charlotte May Lee, 21, of the United Kingdom, was seized at Bandaranke airport in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo earlier this month after having pretended to transport suitcases full of “Kush”, a new medication from West Africa which kills a dozen estimated at a week at Sierra Leone alone.
Lee, from southern London, said that the drug hiding place – which has a street value reported of $ 3.3 million – had been planted in its suitcases without its knowledge, its lawyer, Sampath Perera, said to the BBC.
She is owned in difficult conditions in a prison north of Colombo where she has to sleep on a concrete floor, although Perera said that she was in contact with her family.
The transport carried out on May 12 is the greatest seizure of the relatively new drug in the history of Sri Lankais.
Customs officers proudly posed with the reserve, which could win a sentence of 25 years in prison if it is found guilty of smuggling.
Lee worked in Thailand when she was forced to leave because her 30 -day visa was to run out, so she decided to take a three -hour flight to Sri Lanka while she was waiting for the renewal of her Thai visa, said her lawyer.
“I had never seen them (drugs) before. I did not expect everything when they stopped me at the airport. I thought it was going to be filled with all my things,” Lee in the Daily Mail of the prison.
She also suggested that she knew who had “planted” the drugs in her suitcases, but would not name them.
“They had to plant then,” she said. “I know who did it.”
Kush, who is the most popular with young men, can make individuals fall asleep while walking, collapse unexpectedly and even walk in traffic.
One of the many ingredients in drugs would be human bones, and the insatiable desire for the substance has even led to macabre thieves who serve cemeteries in Sierra Leone.
The president of the country declared the state of emergency on the abuse of Kush last year, while security would have been tightened in the cemeteries to stop the excavation of the skeletons.
The Kush brand image a “death trap”, the president of Sierra Leone, Julius Maada Bio, said that the drug posed a “existential crisis” to his nation.
Lee flew from Bangkok at the same time as another Young British woman is now faced with drug trafficking charges.
Bella Culley, of the county of Durham, in northeast of England, was arrested in the former Soviet nation of Georgia on May 10 after having pretended to be stolen from the capital, Tbilissi, via the United Arab Emirates with more than 30 pounds of marijuana and hashish in its luggage.
She is accused of buying and buying an illegally large amount of drugs, buying and illegally storing narcotic drug marijuana and illegally importing it into Georgia, “said the country’s internal affairs in a statement earlier this year.
Sri Lankan authorities warned against a huge increase in drugs arriving in the country via Bangkok.
“Another passenger who had left Bangkok airport, almost at the same time, was arrested in another country. We stopped this lady (Lee) according to profiling,” said a Customs speaker from Sri Lanka to the BBC.
“It was a nuisance of the rule,” he added, referring to the scourge of drugs.
