Women caught with £1million of cannabis in their suitcases when they landed at Heathrow after flight from Thailand are jailed
Two young women who flew back from Thailand with more than £1m worth of cannabis vacuum sealed in their suitcases have been jailed.
Kirsty Mwapaura, 20, and Tiffany Nhamo, 19, were caught with more than 46kg of cannabis inside their luggage at Heathrow Airport as they returned from home from Thailand on December 21 last year.
At first, they told police they thought they were bringing back phones, but the pair have since admitted they knew they were smuggling drugs.
Student Mwapaura said she was going to be paid up to £6,000 by members of an organised crime group, while Nhamo claimed she was being paid £7,000.
Their luggage contained 46.48kg, estimated to be worth £1.39m on the streets.
Claire Cooper, defending for Nhamo, she the 19-year-old was in financial trouble at the time and 'got herself embroiled in something that is so wildly out of character'.
‘She was approached in the way that young girls with no previous convictions so very sadly often are and she was offered a financial reward,' Ms Cooper told Isleworth Crown Court.
‘She comes from a very loving but not a very wealthy family. Her mother travelled down from Leicester to be with her young daughter today.’
Tiffany Nhamo, 19, of Leicester, and Kirsty Mwapaura, 20, of Shavington, Cheshire, admitted being concerned in the importation of a class B drug. They were jailed for 27 months each. Pictured: Isleworth Crown Court
Michelle Clarke, defending Mwapaura, said she was naive and had ‘very little awareness or understanding’ of what she was doing.
‘This is a young girl who is of good character, who has started university,' Ms Clarke said.
‘She has her family behind her, they are in court, they are fully supportive of her.
‘I know from having spoken to her parents that they have been very blunt with her about her naivety and the really bad decsion that she took.
She said Mwapaura hopes to run a cooking business: ‘She has tried to maintain the good life that she had before she took the bad decision.’
Ravinder Johal, prosecuting, said: ‘They’re both friends, they’ve gone out to Thailand, they’ve flown back together.
‘They each had two suitcases, in each of the cases were 26 vacuum sealed packages.’
Judge John Ainley said: ‘They had been recruited into bringing drugs in to the UK and knowing they were bringing drugs into the UK by criminals who paid for their flights and accommodation.'
He accepted they would ‘ordinarily have nothing to do with the criminal world let alone the world of drugs crime’.
‘This has been a tragic involvement for them and their families, one which is bitterly regretted and one which is vanishingly unlikely to be repeated,' the judge said.
But Judge Ainley added: ‘In my judgement the smuggling of drugs in large quantities has to be deterred even when the defendants are young.
‘The message must go out that if one is going to be involved in this sort of crime with this sort of quantity that will result in immediate imprisonment’.
Nhamo, of Leicester, and Mwapaura, of Shavington, Cheshire, admitted being concerned in the importation of a class B drug.
They were jailed for 27 months each.
