Belfast 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 after he swallowed 75 packets of pure cocaine. Johnston Fayiah, 26, who has an address in the Netherlands but a family in Nigeria, was sentenced to four and a half years by Antrim Crown Court yesterday.
Mr Fayiah was stopped by customs because ‘he fitted the profile of a potential courier’ after coming off an Amsterdam flight at Belfast's International Airport on 5 January, 2008. When initially questioned he denied having any drugs, but agreed to have an X-ray, which showed up 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 them, before admitting that he had been approached ‘by a man called Dan’ who'd paid him €500, with the promise of a further €1,000 upon his return to Holland.
Judge Patrick Lynch told Mr Fayiah if the bags had burst he would have ended up as ‘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 drug courier, rather than a major player.
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