Belfast International Airport drug smuggler jailed
01.07.08
A man has been jailed for trying to smuggle the drugs in to Northern Ireland via Belfast International Airport. Johnston Fayiah, 26, who has an address in the Netherlands but a family in Nigeria, had swallowed 75 packets of pure cocaine. He was sentenced to 4½ years by Antrim Crown Court yesterday.
Mr Fayiah was stopped by customs officers because ‘he fitted the profile of a potential courier’ after coming off an Amsterdam flight on 5 January, 2008. When questioned he denied having any drugs, but agreed to have an X-ray. This showed the 300 grams of the Class A drug contained in the packets, with an estimated value of £100,000.
Despite this however, he claimed to know nothing about the drugs, before admitting that he had been approached ‘by a man called Dan’ who had paid him €500, with the promise of a further €1000 upon his return to Holland.
Judge Patrick Lynch told Mr Fayiah if any of the bags had burst, he would have been ‘a corpse rather than a prisoner’. He added that while Mr Fayiah had acted out of his ‘own personal greed - for narrow financial gain’, he was prepared to accept he was a courier, rather than a major player.
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