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Australian drug suspect fugitive returns home to face jail

Australian fugitive Tony Mokbel arrived in his home country on Saturday after being extradited from Greece to face trial for alleged drug trafficking and killing.

  • Agencies
  • Published: 09:32 May 17, 2008
  • Gulf News

Melbourne: Australian fugitive Tony Mokbel arrived in his home country on Saturday after being extradited from Greece to face trial for alleged drug trafficking and killing.

Mokbel arrived in a jet chartered by the Australian government. He was accompanied by a team of Victoria state and Australian Federal Police officers and was expected to be taken to the high-security Barwon Prison outside the southern city of Melbourne.

The 41-year-old was arrested on an Interpol warrant near Athens last year after skipping bail in 2006 during a cocaine smuggling trial in Australia.

Mokbel, known as "Fat Tony", was sentenced in abstentia to 12 years in jail for cocaine trafficking in 2006. He fled to Greece before the end of that trial.

Mokbel has also been charged with killing Melbourne underworld figure Lewis Moran and drug dealer Michael Marshall, and is accused of a string of other drug offenses.

He has said he is innocent and fought extradition, arguing that Australian courts could not offer him a fair trial. His defence team has said that senior police and government officials in Australia have publicly blamed Mokbel for crimes of which he has not been convicted.

Since his capture last year, Mokbel was held in Greece's maximum security Korydallos prison in western Athens. In March, Greece's Supreme Court upheld a lower court's ruling to extradite Mokbel, who had already been sentenced to a year in a Greek prison for entering the country with a forged passport.

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