The specialized chamber for international crimes at the
High Court in Rwanda, on Thursday, February 15, sentenced a Nigerian
woman to six years in prison for drug trafficking.
Priscilla Duru was arrested at Kigali International Airport
in October 2016 as she tried to smuggle1.3 kilograms of heroin through
Kigali en route to Nigeria.
During the hearings, she denied the charges arguing that
she was given the bag by a Tanzanian woman and didn’t know the contents
of the bag.
Reading the verdict, the presiding judge Alice Rulisa said
that the court had established that Duru entered the country to wait for
another person to give her the narcotics from Tanzania so that she
could transport it to Nigeria.
High Court ruled that the suspect was well aware of the
contraband, waited for over a month in Rwanda before the bag containing
the drugs was brought to her.
Duru, who was in tears during the reading of the verdict,
had previously begged for clemency adding that if she knew that she had
been given drugs, she would have alerted the police before leaving
Kigali as she indicated that she only came in Kigali after she was asked
by a “family friend” who owns a pharmacy in Nigeria to carry for him a
bag with a certain medicine called Ephedrine.
She claimed that she had approached him for help because she needed to cater for her children after losing her husband.
Court ruled that she will have to serve six years in Muhanga Prison, and pay two million Rwandan francs in fines.
Although at the time of her arrest, Duru claimed she didn’t
know what she was carrying, when she appeared in court in January,
2017, she admitted that she was carrying heroin and begged for mercy.
The New Times Rwanda
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