A Nigerian man, Samuel Amechi Okeke, 34, and his wife, a Vietnamese, Ho Thi Nhu Thuy, 26, have been sentenced to 25 years in jail after the police arrested in July 2014 for mailing ten backpacks lined with heroin from the Dangkao district post office in May that year to Australia.
Okeke arrives at the court for sentencing: Photo Credit (Siv Channa/The Cambodia Daily)
The culprits were sentenced at the Phnom Penh Municipal Court and charged with smuggling 1.5kg of heroin from Cambodia to Australia, after the backpacks were intercepted by the custom officials in Australia.
During her trial last month, Thuy admitted to mailing the backpacks, but she only did that because she was asked by a friend, and she never knew the backpacks contained heroin, while Okeke keeps denying he knows about the drugs.
During their court hearing last Thursday, the presiding judge, Than Leng reads;
The court decides to sentence, firstly, Samuel Amechi Okeke, 34, Nigerian, to 25 years in prison and fine him 50 million riel [about $12,500
The judge went on to read the same sentence for Thuy, a judgement that pleases, Hun Rithy, a deputy bureau chief at the Interior Ministry’s internal security department who led the investigation leading to the arrest.
While being led out of the courtroom, Okeke expressed his disappointment about the sentencing, saying;
How can I accept?