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| Igwebuike |
An
Australian court will sentence a Nigerian post-graduate student,
Jackson Igwebuike on 25 October, after he was found guilty of importing
methamphetamine worth $10million to Canberra.
The
drug, worth N3.6 billion was imported by Igwebuike to Canberra in
ornate golden fish statues in October 2015, but alert security men
intercepted the drugs and substituted the ice before he collected the
parcel.
The drug could have had calamitous consequences if sold in the community, federal prosecutors told the court.
Lawyers
for the 34 year-old Nigerian, a graduate of University of Benin, agreed
he acted as“more than just a mere courier" when he accepted delivery of
about 8.47 grams of pure ice before he attempted to board a Murrays bus
to Sydney with the drugs in his bag.
An ACT Supreme Court jury found him guilty of importing a commercial quantity of a border controlled drug in August.
His
trial heard the drugs were discovered when three 20 kilogram statues
that arrived in a shipping crate from China were X-rayed by officers at
Port Botany on October 8. Inside one statue of a fish they found 43
packages that contained a combined total of 10.58 kilograms of
methamphetamine.
Federal police had swapped the drugs with an inert substance” before the fish statue was put back together and repacked.
Taps
of Igwebuike’s phones picked up communication between the accused and
another man in Igbo and with a freight company based in Sydney.
Prosecutors
said Igwebuike used the name “Solomon David” and asked the company for
the package to be delivered to an address in Kaleen.
Undercover
police later watched as the packages were delivered to the address and
collected by Igwebuike, who took them to a second address in the same
suburb.
In a phone conversation with another man soon after, Igwebuike discussed transport and meeting places in Sydney.
He
was arrested as he stood in a queue at the Jolimont Centre for a
Murrays bus to Sydney on October 17. Police seized a suitcase filled
with 43 packages of the drug substitute.
Igwebuike
said he hadn’t known the statues had been filled with drugs. He said
he’d been approached by two men in a carpark and asked to pick up some
decorative glass items.
Those
men later showed up at his house after he had collected the parcels and
broke the statues open, before threatening to kill his wife and destroy
him if he didn’t take the drugs to Sydney, he said.
Commonwealth
prosecutor Edward Chen told a sentence hearing on Tuesday that
Igwebuike had maintained he had been doing a favour for a friend and
wouldn’t admit he committed the crime for profit.
NANS
Tags
Crime