British pensioner, 79, is arrested at airport in Chile 'after being caught with 11 POUNDS of methamphetamine'
A British pensioner has been arrested in Chile's Santiago Airport after allegedly being caught trying to smuggle 11 pounds of methamphetamine into the country.
The 79-year-old man, whose identity has not been revealed, had arrived on a flight from Cancun, Mexico and was detained after a scanner detected a 'suspicious' substance in his suitcase.
He had been due to spend one night in a hotel in the Chilean capital before boarding a flight to Sydney, Australia the following day.
The pensioner appeared in court where a judge approved a prosecution request to remand him in custody pending likely charges and a trial.
Police say the drugs apprehended would have been worth around £200,000 on Chilean streets.
The Brit traveller was asked to open his suitcase in front of cops who discovered a secret compartment where the drugs had been packed.
Airport police chief Sergio Paredes said it was the first time the arrested man had entered Chile.
He said: 'This person came from Mexico and when he was arrested and taken to the anti-narcotics squad's airport offices, he said that the suitcase had been received by some Mexican nationals at Cancun airport.
'He was due to spend a night in a hotel in the centre of Santiago before boarding a flight to Sydney, Australia.'
Mr Paredes said police were still investigating whether the drugs were due to remain in Chile or be taken to Australia.
He told local press: 'Prosecutors are looking into this and trying to establish whether the drug was for internal consumption or was due to be transported by this British national to Australia.'
Chilean customs officers released pictures of the drugs they had confiscated on X, saying they had 'intercepted a foreign citizen'.
Their post read: 'Customs officials intercepted a foreign citizen with more than five of kilos of methamphetamines hidden in a secret compartment in his luggage at Santiago Airport.
The pensioner had been due to spend one night in a hotel in the Chilean capital before boarding a flight to Sydney, Australia (pictured) the following day
'He was stopped after his luggage was scanned and has been remanded in custody.'
The pensioner's arrest is the latest in a series of similar recent apprehensions around the world involving British nationals - although most have been far younger than the man held in Chile.
Yesterday it emerged a British couple aged 33 and 34 had been held at Valencia airport after police discovered 33 kilos of cannabis in their luggage.
The pair claimed they were tourists coming from Thailand after they were intercepted coming off a flight from France.
A 23-year-old British woman in Ghana was arrested last week after being accused of attempting to bring up to 18kg of cannabis into the UK on a British Airways flight to Gatwick.
Meanwhile Bella May Culley, 18, parked a massive international search operation in early May after she was reported missing while she was believed to be holidaying in Thailand.
It was later revealed that the teen, from Billingham, County Durham, had been arrested 4,000 miles away on drug offences in Georgia, allegedly carrying 30 pounds of cannabis into the ex-Soviet nation.
Recently 21-year-old Charlotte Lee May, from Coulsdon, south London, was also arrested in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo after police discovered 46 kg of 'Kush' - a synthetic strain of cannabis - in her suitcase.
The former flight attendant, facing up to 25 years in prison if convicted, is claiming she had 'no idea' about the drugs worth up to £1.2 million and insisting they must have been planted in her luggage without her knowledge.
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BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
How a polo-loving businessman was a secret global drug lord
On the surface, Muhammed Asif Hafeez was an upstanding individual.A global businessman and ambassador of a prestigious London polo club, he rubbed shoulders with the British elite, including members of the Royal also regularly passed on detailed information to the authorities in the UK and Middle East that, in some cases, led to the interception of huge shipments of drugs. He was motivated, he said, simply by what he saw as his "moral obligation to curb and highlight criminal activities".At least, that is what he would have had people reality, Hafeez was himself what US officials described as "one of the world's most prolific drug traffickers".From his residence in the UK, he was the puppet-master of a vast drugs empire, supplying many tonnes of heroin, methamphetamine and hashish from bases in Pakistan and India that were distributed across the world. The gangs he informed on were his rivals - and his motivation was to rid the market of his status in the underworld earned him the moniker "the Sultan".But this criminal power and prestige would not last forever. After a complex joint operation between the British and American authorities, Hafeez, 66, was extradited from the UK in 2023. He pleaded guilty last November. On Friday, he was sentenced to 16 years in a New York prison for conspiring to import drugs - including enough heroin for "millions of doses" - into the US. Having been in custody since 2017, Hafeez's sentence will end in BBC has closely followed Hafeez's case. We have pieced together information from court documents, corporate listings and interviews with people who knew wanted to find out how he managed to stay under the radar for so long - and how he eventually got caught. Hafeez was born in September 1958 to a middle-class family in Lahore, Pakistan. One of six children, his upbringing was comfortable. People in Lahore who knew the family told the BBC that his father had owned a factory near the city. Hafeez also later told a US court that he had trained as a commercial the early 1990s to about the mid-2010s, he ran an outwardly legitimate umbrella company called Sarwani International Corporation, with subsidiary businesses in Pakistan, the UAE and the to its website - which has since been shut down - it sold technical equipment to militaries, governments and police forces throughout the world, including equipment for drug the other businesses under the Sarwani umbrella were a textiles company registered in various countries, an Italian restaurant in Lahore that was a franchise of a well-known Knightsbridge brand, and a company named Tipmoor, based near Windsor to the west of London, which specialised in "polo and equestrian services".These businesses not only afforded him a luxury lifestyle, but secured him access to the UK's most exclusive circles. He was listed as an international ambassador for the prestigious Ham Polo Club for at least three years, from 2009 to 2011. He and his wife Shahina were also photographed chatting to Prince William, and embracing Prince Harry, at the club in Polo Club told the BBC that Hafeez had never been a member of the club, that the club no longer has "ambassadors", and that the current board "has no ties to him". It added that the event at which Hafeez and his wife were photographed meeting the princes "was run by a third party".Sarwani's different global arms were dissolved at various stages in the 2010s, according to their listings on Companies House and equivalent global registries. 'Something fishy going on' A former Sarwani employee based in the UAE told the BBC he suspected there had been "something fishy going on" when he worked for the business, because even big projects were "only paid for in cash". The employee - who has asked not to be identified, for fear of reprisals - said he eventually left the business because he felt uncomfortable with this."There were no [bank] transactions, no records, no existence," he told the would also periodically write letters to the authorities in the UAE and UK informing on rival cartels, under the guise of being a concerned member of the public. The BBC has seen these, as well as letters he received in response from the British Embassy in Dubai and the UK Home Office, thanking him and expressing their appreciation for him getting in Home Office told the BBC it does not comment on individual Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Government of Dubai were contacted by the BBC for comment but did not respond. Members of Hafeez's family shared these letters with the BBC in 2018, while he was embroiled in a lengthy legal fight against extradition to the US. They also submitted them to courts in the UK and, later, to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), as evidence that he had been an informant and needed protection. All the courts disagreed and ruled that this was a ploy by Hafeez to rid the market of the ECHR said, was "someone who had brought to the attention of the authorities the criminal conduct of others who he knew to be actual or potential rivals to his substantial criminal enterprise". While Hafeez was writing these letters, a meeting took place in 2014 that - despite him not being there - would lead to his of Hafeez's close associates met a potential buyer from Colombia in a flat in Mombasa, Kenya. They burned a small amount of heroin in order to demonstrate how pure it was, and said they could supply him with any quantity of "100%... white crystal".The supplier of this high-quality heroin, they had told the buyer, was a man from Pakistan known as "the Sultan" - that is, they would soon learn was that the "buyer" from Colombia was actually working undercover for the US's Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The entire meeting was part of an elaborate sting operation, and had been covertly filmed - footage that has been obtained by the BBC. US court documents reveal the deal was co-ordinated by Baktash and Ibrahim Akasha, two brothers who led a violent cartel in Kenya. Their father was himself a feared kingpin who had been killed in Amsterdam's Red Light District in deal also involved Vijaygiri "Vicky" Goswami, an Indian national who managed the Akashas' October 2014, with the Akashas, Goswami and Hafeez still unaware of who the buyers really were, 99kg of heroin and 2kg of crystal meth were delivered to the fake Colombian traffickers. The Akashas promised to provide hundreds of kilograms more of each drug.A month later, the Akasha brothers and Goswami were arrested in Mombasa. They were released on bail shortly afterwards, and spent over two years fighting extradition to the the background, American law enforcers were working with counterparts in the UK to piece together their case against Hafeez, partly using evidence gathered from devices they had seized when they arrested Goswami and the Akasha brothers. On those, they had found multiple references to Hafeez as a major supplier, and were able to find enough evidence to identify him as "the Sultan".Facing charges in the US didn't stop one of the men, Goswami, from continuing his illegal enterprise. In 2015, while on bail in Kenya, he hatched a plan with Hafeez to transport several tonnes of a drug called ephedrine from a chemical factory in Solapur, India, to a powerful medication that is legal in limited quantities, is used to make methamphetamine. The two men - Goswami and Hafeez - planned to set up a meth factory in Mozambique's capital, Maputo, US court documents show. But their scheme was abandoned in 2016, when police raided the Solapur plant and seized 18 tonnes of Akasha brothers and Goswami finally boarded a flight to the US to face trial in January 2017. Hafeez was arrested eight months later in London, at his flat in the affluent St John's Wood neighbourhood. He was detained at high security Belmarsh Prison in south-east London, and it was from there that he spent six years fighting extradition to the US.A big development happened in 2019 in the US. Goswami pleaded guilty, and told a New York court he had agreed to co-operate with prosecutors. The Akasha brothers also pleaded Akasha was sentenced to 25 years in prison. His brother Ibrahim was sentenced to 23 who is yet to be sentenced, would have testified against Hafeez in the US had the case gone to Belmarsh, Hafeez was running out of tried to stop extradition to the US - but failed to convince magistrates, the High Court in London and the ECHR that he had, in fact, been an informant to the authorities who was "at risk of ill-treatment from his fellow prisoners" as a result. He also claimed the conditions in a US prison would be "inhuman and degrading" for him because of his health conditions, including type 2 diabetes and lost all of these arguments at every stage and was extradited in May case did not go to trial. In November last year, Hafeez pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiring to manufacture and distribute heroin, methamphetamine and hashish and to import them into the US. Pre-sentencing, prosecutors described the "extremely fortunate circumstances" of Hafeez's life, which "throw into harsh relief his decision to scheme... and to profit from the distribution of dangerous substances that destroy lives and whole communities"."Unlike many traffickers whose drug activities are borne, at least in part, from desperation, poverty, and a lack of educational opportunities," they said, "the defendant has lived a life replete with privilege and choice."
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Can an American pope apply US-style fundraising and standards to fix troubled Vatican finances?
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And the structural deficit continues, with the Holy See logging an 83.5 million euro ($95 million) deficit in 2023, according to its latest financial report. As Francis' health worsened, there were signs that his efforts to reform the Vatican's medieval financial culture hadn't really stuck, either. The very same Secretariat of State that Francis had punished for losing tens of millions of euros in the scandalous London property deal somehow ended up heading up a new papal fundraising commission that was announced while Francis was in the hospital. According to its founding charter and statutes, the commission is led by the Secretariat of State's assessor, is composed entirely of Italian Vatican officials with no professional fundraising expertise and has no required external financial oversight. To some Vatican watchers, the commission smacks of the Italian-led Secretariat of State taking advantage of a sick pope to announce a new flow of unchecked donations into its coffers after its 600 million euro ($684 million) sovereign wealth fund was taken away and given to another office to manage as punishment for the London fiasco. 'There are no Americans on the commission. I think it would be good if there were representatives of Europe and Asia and Africa and the United States on the commission,' said Ward Fitzgerald, president of the U.S.-based Papal Foundation. It is made up of wealthy American Catholics that since 1990 has provided over $250 million (219 million euros) in grants and scholarships to the pope's global charitable initiatives. Fitzgerald, who spent his career in real estate private equity, said American donors — especially the younger generation — expect transparency and accountability from recipients of their money, and know they can find non-Vatican Catholic charities that meet those expectations. 'We would expect transparency before we would start to solve the problem,' he said. That said, Fitzgerald said he hadn't seen any significant let-up in donor willingness to fund the Papal Foundation's project-specific donations during the Francis pontificate. Indeed, U.S. donations to the Vatican overall have remained more or less consistent even as other countries' offerings declined, with U.S. bishops and individual Catholics contributing more than any other country in the two main channels to donate to papal causes. A head for numbers and background fundraising Francis moved Prevost to take over the diocese of Chiclayo, Peru, in 2014. Residents and fellow priests say he consistently rallied funds, food and other life-saving goods for the neediest — experience that suggests he knows well how to raise money when times are tight and how to spend wisely. He bolstered the local Caritas charity in Chiclayo, with parishes creating food banks that worked with local businesses to distribute donated food, said the Rev. Fidel Purisaca Vigil, a diocesan spokesperson. In 2019, Prevost inaugurated a shelter on the outskirts of Chiclayo, Villa San Vicente de Paul, to house desperate Venezuelan migrants who had fled their country's economic crisis. The migrants remember him still, not only for helping give them and their children shelter, but for bringing live chickens obtained from a donor. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Prevost launched a campaign to raise funds to build two oxygen plants to provide hard-hit residents with life-saving oxygen. In 2023, when massive rains flooded the region, he personally brought food to the flood-struck zone. Within hours of his May 8 election, videos went viral on social media of Prevost, wearing rubber boots and standing in a flooded street, pitching a solidarity campaign, 'Peru Give a Hand,' to raise money for flood victims. The Rev. Jorge Millán, who lived with Prevost and eight other priests for nearly a decade in Chiclayo, said he had a 'mathematical' mentality and knew how to get the job done. Prevost would always be on the lookout for used cars to buy for use around the diocese, Millán said, noting that the bishop often had to drive long distances to reach all of his flock or get to Lima, the capital. Prevost liked to fix them up himself, and if he didn't know what to do, 'he'd look up solutions on YouTube and very often he'd find them,' Millán told The Associated Press. Before going to Peru, Prevost served two terms as prior general, or superior, of the global Augustinian order. While the order's local provinces are financially independent, Prevost was responsible for reviewing their balance sheets and oversaw the budgeting and investment strategy of the order's headquarters in Rome, said the Rev. Franz Klein, the order's Rome-based economist who worked with Prevost. The Augustinian campus sits on prime real estate just outside St. Peter's Square and supplements revenue by renting out its picturesque terrace to media organizations (including the AP) for major Vatican events, including the conclave that elected Leo pope. But even Prevost saw the need for better fundraising, especially to help out poorer provinces. Toward the end of his 12-year term and with his support, a committee proposed creation of a foundation, Augustinians in the World. At the end of 2023, it had 994,000 euros ($1.13 million) in assets and was helping fund self-sustaining projects across Africa, including a center to rehabilitate former child soldiers in Congo. 'He has a very good interest and also a very good feeling for numbers,' Klein said. 'I have no worry about the finances of the Vatican in these years because he is very, very clever.' ___ Franklin Briceño contributed from Lima, Peru. ___ Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Aussies react to shock arrest video of young Aboriginal woman in tiny town
Aussies have questioned the use of force used by officers during the arrest of a young Aboriginal woman in Western Australia. Officers detained the 25-year-old woman from Millars Well, a town about 540km northeast of Exmouth, after she allegedly breached bail conditions on Monday. Footage of the arrest, shared on Facebook, shows the woman screaming as she is pulled from a car, handcuffed on the ground and carried by two officers to a van. As a crowd gathered outside the home, a female officer was seen gesturing with a can of pepper spray to try and stop them from approaching. Another police vehicle with more officers arrived as the woman was put in the van. At least two male officers could then be seen approaching the group and pushing them away from the police van. Shocked viewers questioned the officers' use of force in the comments. 'I legit got tears. This is very triggering,' one person wrote. 'There was no need for this kind of force,' a second said. 'If they don't know how to work with mob, why don't they talk to the elders in community and get help,' a third commented. 'This town is not far from where I live,' a fourth added. 'This behaviour by police is so unnecessary!' The woman was not injured during the arrest and no medical assistance was required, WA Police told Daily Mail Australia in a statement. The woman was arrested for allegedly breaching her bail conditions by being at a home in Millars Well. 'It will be alleged as the woman was being arrested, she obstructed police, locking herself in a vehicle,' police said in a statement. Officers were called to the home about 10:30am on Monday after an alleged physical altercation between people known to each other. Police had responded to an incident at the same location earlier that day. WA Police declined to comment on the way officers handled the incident. The woman has since been charged with one count each of obstructing public officers, common assault in circumstances of aggravation or racial aggravation and possessing a prohibited drug, methylamphetamine. She appeared in court on Monday and is next due to appear before the Karratha Magistrates Court on July 29. The arrest video came just days after the shocking death of an Indigenous man Kumanjayi White at a supermarket in Alice Springs on May 27. NT Police last week said White 'stopped breathing' after he was restrained by two officers and confirmed the death is being investigated on behalf of the coroner. It is the second death to rock the small Yuendumu community and comes six years after Kumanjayi Walker was shot dead by NT Police officer Zachary Rolfe.
