A shipment of 20 cricket bats, stuffed with 7.5kg of crystal meth, has landed a man in a sticky wicket and a five-year spell behind bars.
The High Criminal Court also fined the 43-year-old BD3,000 and ruled to deport him after the completion of his sentence.
A Customs Affairs officer testified that he was scanning incoming mail packages when he saw a shipment of 11 cricket bats and other sports equipment, including cricket thigh pads, guards, balls and shoes.
The package, arriving from Pakistan, was addressed to the Pakistani expatriate, who came to Bahrain six months earlier to work as a house painter.
“The items inside the shipment contained an unusually high density of materials,” testified the officer in Public Prosecution hearings. “We opened the boxes, and inside the bats, we found a number of bags containing a crystal powder, which all weighed around 5kg.”
On the same day, a second package from Pakistan was searched. It contained nine more cricket bats similarly stuffed with powdered substance, amounting to a total of 2.5kg. Although it was addressed to another person, both had the defendant’s contact information on them.
The case was handed over to the Anti-Narcotics Directorate, which launched an investigation into the matter, and planned an operation to catch the importer red-handed.
Policemen collaborated with the courier responsible for delivering the cricket bats, sending an undercover officer with the postal worker who transported the sports equipment shipment to the defendant.
The man had asked for the packages to be delivered to his hotel room in Manama and he sent a location pin as requested by the courier.
As soon as he signed a form to receive the shipment, and was handed the goods, police arrested him. No prohibited items were found on his person, but a search of his hotel room yielded a sensitive digital scale, possibly used to weigh and portion out narcotics for distribution.
A subsequent investigation discovered that a ‘well-organised and methodical’ network of drug dealers was behind the shipment, who typically push their wares through dead drops, the court heard.
He added that, once a shipment was received, quantities of narcotics were distributed to different dealers and promoters, and that the defendant filled this intermediary role between the kingpin and the on-the-street drug sellers.
The defendant admitted to prosecutors that he agreed with a man named ‘Freddy’ to receive the shipment, in return for cash.
“I met Freddy in Manama, a month-and-a-half before I was arrested, and he said he’d take care of my accommodation and pay my hotel bills if I worked for him.”
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