Ngurah Rai International Airport customs officials announced Monday that they had foiled a drug smuggling attempt and arrested a suspect, a German national identified as Martin Robert Moller, 41, as well as seizing a total of 288 grams of hashish. The suspect had transported the contraband by swallowing 22 latex balloons filled with hashish, a dangerous practice popularly known as body packing. Head of the customs office for Bali, West Nusa Tenggara and East Nusa Tenggara, Rahmat Subagyo, revealed that the suspect, who works as a graphic designer, was arrested on Friday at around 3 p.m. after he disembarked from a plane from Bangkok, Thailand.
It is common here for law enforcement agencies to announce the arrest of a suspect in sensitive cases, including drug trafficking, several days after the actual arrest has been made to provide investigating officers with sufficient time to grill the suspect on possible accomplices and networks. “At that time there were three flights that landed almost simultaneously at Ngurah Rai, and my officers had set their eyes on the suspect,” he said. The fact that the officers knew their target suggested that the customs office had prior knowledge of the arrival of a possible drug mule. In the past, such knowledge was usually based on tips provided by Interpol.
The officers, however, were a bit shocked when the X-ray machine found nothing suspicious in the suspect’s luggage. “The officers then began to look at the possibility of body packing.” They approached the suspect and carried out a body search before escorting him to a nearby hospital for an X-ray examination. The resulting images showed that there were scores of egg-shaped objects in his stomach cavity. “Actually, during the trip to the hospital, the suspect discharged two latex capsules and tried to throw them away, but the officers stopped him from doing so.”
Following the examination, the officers imposed a diet of fresh fruit and milk on the suspect to speed up the discharge process. On Friday the suspect discharged 19 capsules and on the following day three more capsules. “There were a total of 22 capsules discharged, which contained 288 grams of hashish. Hashish commands a street price of Rp 600,000 [US$63] per gram, meaning that the suspect was carrying illegal contraband worth around Rp 172.8 million.” The suspect, who had visited Bali 20 times, bought the illegal contraband in Bangkok for Rp 8 million, claiming that the drug was for his personal use during his stay in Bali. “I have been using hashish for 20 years,” he said.
The suspect, who speaks fluently in Bahasa Indonesia, now faces criminal charges that could land him in jail for up to 20 years. Moller is the second German national arrested for drug trafficking by customs officials. In 2010, Peter Achim Franz Grobman was caught carrying 2.2 grams of marijuana. He was sentenced to five years imprisonment by Denpasar District Court. The appellate court reduced his sentence to four years. Through this year, Ngurah Rai’s customs officials have foiled eight smuggling attempts and seized 10.5 kilograms of illegal drugs. The alleged perpetrators were foreign nationals from Malaysia, Germany, Australia, the UK, Uganda, Italy and Singapore.
source : bali daily
source : bali daily
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