A specialized chamber for international crimes at the High Court in Rwanda, has sentenced a Nigerian woman to six years in prison for drug trafficking.
The suspect, 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.
The 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 the bag given to her contains drugs, she would have alerted the police before leaving Kigali.
Duru indicated that she only came in Kigali after a “family friend” who owns a pharmacy in Nigeria asked her to carry a bag with a certain medicine called Ephedrine.
The suspect 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.
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