A man who was arrested at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport in September this year for attempting to smuggle about a kilo of heroin was given an eight-year prison sentence by Vantaa District Court last week.
The man had swallowed 67 packages of the drug. He arrived in Finland on a flight from India, and intended to move on to Poland. The final destination of the heroin was the Italian drug market. Mika Ylitolva of the anti-crime unit of Finnish Customs says that he does not remember a case in which so much heroin had been smuggled internally; the method is more frequently used for smuggling cannabis.
The convict, 28-year-old Nigerian-bornVictor Obinna Madufor, who is a resident in Poland, told investigators that he had smuggled heroin or cocaine from Poland to Italy on two previous occasions, a quarter of a kilo at a time.
The consignment that was seized earlier this year also had Italy as its final destination. Madufor said that he had been promised EUR 5,000 for transporting the drug.
He told the court that swallowing the packages, each of which contained about 15 grams of the drug, was very difficult – it took him about half an hour to get them all down.
The breakage of just one of the packages would have had deadly consequences. Madufor was kept under observation in hospital until the last of the packages had been excreted.
