A house painter-turned-drug dealer has lost his court appeal after being found guilty of importing 7.5kg of crystal meth via air mail.
The Supreme Criminal Appeals Court heard that the drugs were stuffed inside 20 cricket bats arriving from Pakistan and addressed to the appellant.
Last month, the High Criminal Court sentenced the Pakistani expatriate to five years in prison, fined him 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 43-year-old appellant, who had come to Bahrain only six months earlier to work as a house painter.
The officer testified that the mail appeared to contain ‘an unusually high density of materials’, and went on to uncover a number of bags containing a crystal powder inside the bats, weighing 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 appellant’s contact information on them.
An investigation was launched by the Anti-Narcotics Directorate. An operation was set up to catch the importer red-handed.
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.
According to investigators, a ‘well-organised and methodical’ network of drug dealers was behind the shipment, who typically push their wares through dead drops, the court heard.
Once a shipment was received, quantities of narcotics are distributed to different dealers and promoters.
The appellant reportedly filled this intermediary role between the kingpin and the on-the-street drug sellers.
He 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.”
zainab@gdnmedia.bh
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