Dubai: A visitor will spend 10 years behind bars for smuggling and possessing 73 heroin capsules that drug enforcement officers found hidden in his intestines and under his bed.
Acting on an informant’s tip off, Dubai Police’s anti-narcotics officers raided the 29-year-old Pakistani visitor’s hotel room in Deira and found some of the capsules hidden under the bed in March.
During the raid, the 29-year-old defendant, W.M., was said to have admitted to the police that he had smuggled the capsules in his intestines and a few were still in his body.
The Dubai Court of First Instance jailed W.M. for ten years and fined him Dh50,000 for smuggling and possessing the heroin for export purposes.
When the defendant showed up in court, he confessed that he smuggled the drugs and intended to export them without specifying the final destination.
According to Wednesday’s ruling, presiding judge Fahd Al Shamsi said the accused will be deported following the completion of his punishment. An anti-narcotics policeman testified that an informant alerted Dubai Police’s Anti-narcotics Department that W.M. possessed and consumed heroin in a hotel in Deira. “After obtaining prosecutors’ permission, we raided the hotel room at 2.30am. We searched the defendant and he did not carry anything. However we found a green bag that contained a large number of capsules which looked like heroin. Upon confronting the defendant, he admitted that he had smuggled the capsules in his intestine and that he could not extract all the capsules… he said he still had more capsules in his body. We rushed him to hospital to extract the remaining capsules,” claimed the policeman.
Wednesday’s ruling remains subject to appeal within 15 days.
