Brit faces huge term in notorious hellhole jail if meth drug mule claim proved
The pensioner was held after leaving a flight from the Mexican resort of Cancun at Santiago Airport, where he had hoped to stay overnight and then catch a flight to Australia
A British pensioner faces years in one of South America's most notorious prisons if convicted after allegedly being caught trying to smuggle five kilos of methamphetamine into Chile.
The 79-year-old was held after leaving a flight from the Mexican resort of Cancun at Santiago Airport. After spending the night at a hotel in the Chilean capital, he was booked on a flight to Sydney, Australia, the following day.
The unnamed pensioner was remanded in custody following a court appearance after a judge approved a prosecution request to send him to prison pending probable charges and trial. Cops say the drugs he was apprehended with would have been worth £200,000 on the streets of the South American country.
An official told the Mirror that anyone, including a foreign national, found guilty of the importation of such a quantity of drugs would be sent to Santiago's brutal San Miguel Prison. The jail is notorious for its overcrowded conditions and a history of violence, including a deadly 2010 fire that killed 81 inmates.
The fire, which began during a fight between inmates, highlighted the state of Chile's prison system. The prison was designed to house 900 inmates but holds up to 2,000 men.
"Anyone found guilty of importing drugs into Chile beyond what is classed as for personal use is sentenced to serve their time at San Miguel,' the official said.
"Five kilogrammes of methamphetamine is a quantity beyond what is acceptable for a lesser sentence, and if found guilty, the offence attracts up to 15 years in prison."
The Brit was intercepted after his luggage was put through an airport scanner. The pensioner was asked to open his suitcase in front of police after they detected a 'suspicious' substance and cops 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 added: '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, saying: '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.
'He was stopped after his luggage was scanned and has been remanded in custody.'
The drugs 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 as they got 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 May 18 British Airways flight to Gatwick.
Bella May Culley, 18, sparked a massive international search operation in early May after she was reported missing while she was believed to be holidaying in Thailand.
However, 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 (14kg) of cannabis into the ex-Soviet nation.
And recently 21-year-old Charlotte Lee May, from Coulsdon, south London, was 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.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Record
39 minutes ago
- Daily Record
Dad dragged away from dying daughter's bed by cops hit with huge legal bill
Dr Rashid Abbasi will have to pay the legal fees after losing his case for wrongful arrest. A dad who was dragged away from his dying daughter's hospital bed by police has been hit with a huge legal bill. Dr Rashid Abbasi will have to pay the legal fees after losing his case for wrongful arrest. He also brought a civil claim for false imprisonment and assault and battery against Northumbria Police but was condemned as dishonest by a judge. Now, he will have to pay for the five-day trial at Newcastle Crown Court. It means he will have to pay for his civil case and around 60 to 70 per cent of the legal costs of Northumbria Police, a bill estimated at anywhere from £50,000 up to £100,000. In disturbing video images reported by the Mirror, footage showed him shouting 'b*******' and biting officers who restrained and dragged him from intensive care in August 2019. Dr Abbasi had attempted to recover some costs under a one way cost shifting regime but it is understood that police have opposed that move and it is set to be rejected by the judge. It was a bid to offset some of the 'costs liability' which will run into tens of thousands of pounds. Police footage showed Dr Abbasi, 64, sparked the violence in the paediatric unit of the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle, said Recorder James Murphy in his judgement. He condemned his 'quite appalling' allegations that an officer had told him that he would never see daughter Zainab again as untrue and said that he doubted even Dr Abbasi had ever believed it. In his damning judgement, he said: "I would be very surprised that a member of the public let alone a police officer would not have decided there was likely to be a breach of the peace. "The attitude of Dr Abbasi at the time described by the nurses and also the security guards paint a much more accurate picture of the menace present on the ward used by Dr Abbasi. "It is perfectly clear to me looking at his demeanour and attitude. If I was a bystander having watched this footage, a reasonable description would have been that Dr Abbasi was a coiled spring." He and his wife, Aliya, 57, also a doctor, were told that medics wanted to remove Zainab, six, from a ventilator keeping her alive. The little girl suffered from a life-limiting neurodegenerative condition called Niemann-Pick Disease. It was a 'truly shocking' incident, the judge said. She died four weeks later. Speaking after the case earlier this month, Dr Abbasi said: "My daughter Zainab was the light of my life. "She was a critically ill young girl. She needed both her parents by her bedside. Any father would have been desperate to stay. "I am disappointed that the arrest was held to be lawful and the description of me by the Judge as a menace was unwarranted and hurtful and is not borne out by the video footage which tells its own story." His solicitor, Daniel Cooper, Partner at Imran Khan and Partners, said he would be advising on the merits of an appeal "in due course." Both Northumbria Police and Dr Abassi's legal team declined to comment on the legal bill.
The Courier
an hour ago
- The Courier
Bizarre claims of Perthshire tea blagger Thomas Robinson – bomb disposal, surviving deadly snake bites and inventing Bag for Life
It was not just the whirlwind success of Thomas Robinson's Scottish tea plantation that prosecutors found hard to swallow. There were many aspects of the 55-year-old's personal life and Forrest Gump-esque career that were difficult to believe – and even tougher to fact-check. 'I enjoy telling people that I was one of the inventors of the Bag For Life,' he said. 'They don't believe it. Then when they go away and Google it, they come back with a different impression of me.' Robinson, who was this week convicted of a £550k fake Scottish tea fraud, claimed he was part of a team of three people who produced the now ubiquitous shopping carrier for Waitrose in the late 1990s. There is no evidence to back up his claim. Investigators found no connection between the Bag for Life and Thomas Robinson. Or Thomas O'Brien. Or Tam O'Braan. So who is the man behind the Perthshire grown brew that was too good to be true? Taking the witness stand towards the end of his trial, Robinson was asked to declare his name. 'Thomas James O'Brien,' he said. Born Thomas Robinson in Greenwich, London in 1970, he said he went to an Irish primary school in County Down. But he later said by the age of eight he was educated in London. He said he achieved a qualification in food technology from a college in London's Elephant and Castle in the late 1980s. 'It was the same college where Charlie Chaplin and Michael Caine went,' he told jurors. Robinson denied he had ever told anyone he was a member of the British armed forces, but said he was part of the 'Irish Defence Force' for a year in the late 1990s. He served on the Irish border but also went to 'various overseas locations' to guard embassies. When pressed on how a London-born man with a UK passport would be in the Irish army, he told the court: 'One can have dual nationality.' Asked by fiscal depute Joanne Ritchie what kind of discharge he received from the army, Robinson replied: 'Regular.' He insisted he could not divulge any details of his army career. The court heard how he told Jamie Russell of the Wee Tea Company he saw a soldier die in combat. Robinson said his former business associate was confused and he had in fact told him he had seen a man in a Hearts top being killed in a road accident in Thailand. The court heard he had also bragged about being involved in bomb disposal operations and told others he was a military chef. 'You went as far as to make up these elaborate lies so you appeared to be a man of integrity,' Ms Ritchie told him. 'You wanted to appear as someone who people trust.' Around the same time he was supposedly in the army, he claimed to be studying plastics at the Athlone Institute of Technology in Ireland for 'a year and a bit'. Meanwhile, he was enjoying a career as a professional rugby player. He told the court he played 'to a high standard' at several clubs including Blackheath and Liverpool Stanley. He was so good at rugby, he even had a coaching career, he said. At some point, he also studied Gaelic in Kilkenny. But all evidence of his head-spinning achievements during the 1990s were lost in a flood, he said. All of his qualifications, rugby coaching certificates and paperwork from his army days are now a 'pile of mush' in a water-logged part of an outhouse in Dalreoch. Robinson then claimed to work in the flour and cereal industry, before moving into plastics, where he supposedly developed the Bag For Life. By April 2010 when he married partner Grace Wallace in their then-home city of Edinburgh, he had changed his name to Thomas O'Brien. During his tea plantation days he told people – including the press – his wife was a lawyer but in court he said she worked for the office of national statistics. Their marriage certificate reveals Robinson was a chemical engineer, also noting his father James Robinson was a colonel in the Royal Artillery. Asked how he got a job as a chemical engineer with no chemistry qualifications, he said he studied the subject at Napier University – but did not graduate. At some point, he somehow managed to live on a canoe in the Amazon for four years where he was bitten by a deadly spider, as he told Country Life in 2017. In November 2010, his company Thomas James Consultants Ltd – set up to protect his 'intellectual property' – received a £20,469 grant from the European Development Fund. The grant was to develop and test degradable plastics, which became crucial to his tea-growing business in Perthshire. Robinson became director of a company called EconVerte which carried out crop trials and experiments. He told the court his work secured him a contract with President Barrack Obama's administration to carry out maize trials in a dustbowl. Where was this contract now? The same bag of mush in his basement. He resigned from EconVerte in 2012, the year he moved with his family to Dalreoch Farm, Amulree. According to Companies House records, the Wee Tea Plantation was incorporated in August 2014. Sole shareholder Robinson said he had earlier travelled to the Himalayas to see for himself how to grow tea in harsh conditions. There, he was struck by the revelation that quality tea could be grown in Scotland. 'I spoke to an elder there and he said he had always wondered why we didn't do it in Scotland,' he said. 'We have the right conditions, the hills and the water.' He shared his idea with his friend Jamie Russell, who he had met at his Bread Street cafe in Edinburgh around 2008. Robinson told the trial he was a near-daily customer at the coffee shop and the pair bonded over their love of rugby. At the cafe, he also met Derek Walker, another regular customer, as well as Lindsay Deuchars who was an employee. Mr Russell and Mr Walker established the Wee Tea Company at an industrial unit in Dunfermline in 2012. A year or two later, Robinson made a pitch to the fledgling business owners. 'I told Jamie what I was doing,' he said. 'I told him I thought I had worked out how to grow tea in Scotland.' The trio gathered for a meeting in a freezing potting shed in Dalreoch, where Robinson explained his big secret – a 'unique' polymer sheeting that better retained moisture in the soil and prevented crops from being smothered by weeds. Robinson said the plastic sheeting allowed his plants to grow at a much faster rate than normal. He described the sheeting as 'known technology' but used in an innovative way, comparing himself to Steve Jobs inventing the iPhone. Prosecutors said it looked like a bin liner. His role, he said, was to attract larger retailers while supplying Mr Russell with wet tea leaves grown at Amulree. It was decided Robinson would became Tam O'Braan 'for press purposes'. He named himself after the river that runs through his plantation. The plan was to aim for the higher end of the tea market. While they claimed the Dorchester, Balmoral and Fortnum and Mason among their stockists, Robinson had further lofty targets including Harrods and the Savoy. One of the tricks he used to secure sales was to tell people his produce was a favourite of the Queen. When pressed on this, he said he had at some point received a call from a member of staff at Buckingham Palace who told him how much Her Majesty had enjoyed his tea while visiting the Dorchester. Robinson's Wee Tea Plantation was dissolved in October 2019, around the time the Food Standards Scotland probe was getting into full swing. Since, Robinson said he has worked for an environmental company in Birmingham and driven a school bus for Stagecoach during the Covid lockdown. He most recently secured a job as a senior chef at the plush Taymouth Castle, near Kenmore. He told jurors his job had been kept open for him after an industrial accident in 2023, which left him with cognitive and memory issues. When asked what happened, he said: 'I tripped over an electrical wire and fell into the basement of a castle.' Taymouth Castle declined to comment on the alleged incident, which is understood to have happened without witnesses and was not caught on CCTV. During his evidence, Robinson apologised for some unusual mannerisms such as taking deep breaths before reading printed words. 'I know it can look a bit strange,' he said. 'I'm better with pictures.' When the jury were out of the room, he appeared in discomfort or pain. Concerned, Sheriff Keith O'Mahony told Robinson he was welcome to sit and give his evidence, instead of stand. 'I just want to come across as normal as possible,' Robinson replied.
South Wales Argus
an hour ago
- South Wales Argus
BBC to pay Gerry Adams 100,000 euros in defamation case
Mr Adams took the BBC to court over an episode of its Spotlight programme, and an accompanying online story, which he said defamed him by alleging he sanctioned the killing of former Sinn Fein official Denis Donaldson, for which he denies any involvement. A jury at the High Court in Dublin found in his favour on Friday after determining that was the meaning of words included in the programme and article. It also found the BBC's actions were not in good faith and the corporation had not acted in a fair and reasonable way. Mr Adams' legal team said the verdict of the jury was a 'full vindication' for their client while the BBC said it was 'disappointed' with the outcome. Mr Donaldson was shot dead in Co Donegal in 2006, months after admitting his role as a police and MI5 agent over 20 years. In the programme broadcast in September 2016, an anonymous source given the pseudonym Martin claimed the shooting was sanctioned by the political and military leadership of the IRA and that Mr Adams gave 'the final say'. In 2009, the dissident republican group the Real IRA claimed responsibility for the killing and a Garda investigation into the matter remains ongoing. Mr Adams said the allegation was a 'grievous smear' while the BBC has described the legal action as a 'cynical attempt to launder his reputation'. The high-profile republican sought damages of at least 200,000 euro (£168,000) from the BBC. However, the British public service broadcaster had argued it would be a 'cruel joke' to award the former Sinn Fein president any damages. It had argued the allegation was corroborated by five other sources and that Mr Adams had a reputation of being a member of the IRA. Denis Donaldson was killed in 2006 (BBC/PA) After six hours and 49 minutes of deliberations in total, the jury awarded the plaintiff 100,000 euro – which falls within the 'medium' range for defamation. Speaking outside court, Mr Adams said taking this case was 'about putting manners on the British Broadcasting Corporation'. He told reporters: 'I know many, many journalists. I like to think that I get on well with the most of them, and I wish you well, and I would uphold your right to do your job. 'But the British Broadcasting Corporation upholds the ethos of the British state in Ireland, and in my view it's out of sync in many, many fronts with the Good Friday Agreement. 'It hasn't caught on to where we are on this island as part of the process, the continuing process, of building peace and justice, and harmony, and, hopefully, in the time ahead, unity.' He said there is an onus on everyone, including himself, to deal with these legacy issues. He said: 'I'm very mindful of the Donaldson family in the course of this long trial, and indeed of the victims' families who have had to watch all of this. 'I want to say that the Justice Minister Jim O'Callaghan should meet the family of Denis Donaldson as quickly as possible, and that there's an onus on both governments and everyone else, and I include myself in this, to try and deal with these legacy issues as best that we can.' Gerry Adams outside the High Court in Dublin after the jury returned its verdict (Brian Lawless/PA) His solicitor Paul Tweed said Mr Adams was 'very pleased with this resounding verdict', adding the award of damages 'speaks for itself'. Johnsons Solicitors, who acted for Mr Adams, said: 'The outcome today has provided a full vindication for our client, Mr Adams.' Speaking outside court, Adam Smyth, director of BBC Northern Ireland, said: 'We are disappointed by this verdict. 'We believe we supplied extensive evidence to the court of the careful editorial processes and journalistic diligence applied to this programme, and to the accompanying online article. 'Moreover, it was accepted by the court and conceded by Gerry Adams' legal team that the Spotlight broadcast and publication were of the highest public interest. 'We didn't want to come to court but it was important that we defend our journalism and we stand by that decision.' He added: 'Our past is difficult terrain for any jury and we thank them for their diligence and careful consideration of the issues in this case. 'The implications of their decision, though, are profound. As our legal team made clear, if the BBC's case cannot be won under existing Irish defamation law, it is hard to see how anyone's could, and they warned how today's decision would hinder freedom of expression. Director of BBC Northern Ireland, Adam Smyth and journalist Jennifer O'Leary outside the High Court (Brian Lawless/PA) 'Of course, a case of this importance, duration and complexity involves significant expense. In common with other media organisations, the BBC has insurance and makes financial provision for ongoing and anticipated legal claims.' BBC Spotlight reporter Jennifer O'Leary said she had 'nothing to hide, only sources to protect'. She also thanked the BBC and its legal team for defending journalism. Ms O'Leary said: 'I'm a big believer in trying your best in life and going about your business with integrity, and I want to pay a particular tribute to our witnesses in court, senator Michael McDowell, Trevor Ringland, and in particular Ann Travers, who spoke so courageously.' She said there were thousands of victims and survivors of the troubles in the UK and Ireland, adding: 'Those people carry the burden of their grief and trauma with incredible dignity and courage, and they are the people I am thinking of, I know my colleagues are also thinking of. I am thinking of all of them today.' The BBC will have to pay costs but the amount has yet to be decided. Mr Smyth added the corporation will take some time to consider the implications of the ruling.
