Another South African Woman Caught with Drugs at Suvarnabhumi Airport

 

Chiangrai Times – Another South African woman has been arrested at Bangkok airport attempting to smuggle 2kg of crystal methamphetamine, Thai police said on Wednesday.

Narcotics police, acting on a tip-off, stopped Adelina Ntshebleng Lephutha Ononiwu, 31, at Suvarnabhumi Airport on Monday after she arrived from the Kenyan capital and was waiting for a flight to Cambodia.

Police found the drugs – also known as “ice” – in three bags hidden in a secret compartment in her luggage, they said. The haul has a street value of $80 000 in Thailand.

“She said she was hired by a Nigerian man to deliver the luggage to Phnom Penh,” Colonel Pornchai Charoenwong of the Narcotic Suppression Bureau said.

“He paid her 24 000 baht ($760) and said she will get a further 200 000 baht when the job was completed,” he said, adding she started her journey in Benin, West Africa.

Ononiwu was charged with drug trafficking, which carries a death sentence in Thailand, although executions are rarely sanctioned.

Thailand, along with other countries in the region, has seen a marked increase in seizures of methamphetamine as the world opiate trade declines.

Earlier this month a Bangkok court jailed South African Nolubabalo “Babsie” Nobanda for 15 years on Monday for smuggling cocaine in her dreadlocks.

Nobanda, 23, from Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape, was arrested at the Bangkok International Airport in December for trying to smuggle cocaine from Brazil to Thailand. Initially, she was given a 30-year sentence but that term was reduced because she was co-operative with the authorities.