A young Guyanese woman, held at the Dubai International Airport officers with 3.013 kilos of cocaine in her handbag in May, was sentenced to ten years in jail and fined Dhs50,000 (Gy$2.7M) on Thursday.
The woman, identified only as “NR (22),” was intercepted while on her way from Brazil to South Africa, according to a report in The Gulf Today newspaper.
“I was supposed to deliver cocaine to South Africa and receive $3,500 in reward,” she was quoted as saying in the report after her arrest in May.
The report added that when she was asked about the quantity of the drugs, she allegedly added that drug dealers fooled her: “I thought I was carrying only a kilogramme of cocaine. I did not know that they had given me three kilos,” she is reported as saying.
According to the report, at the Dubai Criminal Court on September 30, the woman admitted to the charge before Judge Badr Eisa Al Samt. She is to be deported after serving her jail term. A Djiboutian police corporal testified that he had suspected the woman in the airport’s transit hall. “She was carrying ‘a men’s leather handbag.’ I asked her the price at which she had bought her ticket but she could not tell. She could not even tell me the name of the hotel or place in Johannesburg where she was going to stay,” the corporal said.
A female Emirati corporal at the scanning device added that, “I opened NR’s handbag and seized three plastic bags containing a suspicious white powder. When I asked NR about the plastic bags, she burst into incessant tears.”
During interrogation, she claimed that while in Guyana, a female friend called Sofia asked her whether she wanted to make money from a drug deal. Sofia subsequently in-troduced her to Mike, a Nigerian man residing in Brazil, who sent her a ticket to Sao Paulo.
The report said the man received her at the airport and took her to one of the hotels where she spent three days.
“On the date of my departure, I was inside a taxi when Mike gave me a handbag of drugs to be taken to Johannesburg. He requested that I deliver them to a man in South Africa and that the latter was waiting for me at the airport with a reward of $3,500 if all went well,” she was quoted as saying.
