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A former flight attendant caught smuggling over 100 pounds of a deadly new synthetic drug made of human bones faces up to 25 years in a Sri Lankan prison.
Charlotte May Lee, 21, from the United Kingdom, was seized at Bandaranaike Airport in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo earlier this month after allegedly carrying suitcases full of “kush,” a new drug originating in West Africa which kills an estimated dozen people a week in Sierra Leone alone.
Lee, from south London, claimed the drug stash — which has a reported street value of $3.3 million — was planted in her suitcases without her knowledge, her lawyer, Sampath Perera, told the BBC.
She is being held in harsh conditions in a jail north of Colombo where she has to sleep on a concrete floor, though Perera said she’s been in contact with her family.
The haul made on May 12 is the biggest seizure of the relatively new drug in Sri Lankan history.
Customs officers posed proudly with the stash, which could land Lee a 25-year prison sentence if she is found guilty of smuggling.
Lee had been working in Thailand when she was forced to leave because her 30-day visa was due to run out, so she decided to take a three-hour flight to Sri Lanka while she waited for the renewal of her Thai visa, her lawyer said.
“I had never seen them [the drugs] before. I didn’t expect it all when they pulled me over at the airport. I thought it was going to be filled with all my stuff,” Lee told the Daily Mail from prison.
She also implied she knew who had “planted” the drugs in her suitcases, but wouldn’t name them.
“They must have planted it then,” she said. “I know who did it.”
Kush, which is most popular with young men, can cause individuals to fall asleep while walking, collapse unexpectedly and even wander into moving traffic.
One of the drug’s many ingredients is reportedly human bones, and the insatiable desire for the substance has even led to ghoulish grave robbers raiding cemeteries in Sierra Leone.
The country’s president declared a state of emergency over abuse of kush last year, while security has reportedly been tightened in graveyards to stop the digging up of skeletons.
Branding kush a “death trap,” Sierra Leone’s President, Julius Maada Bio, said the drug posed an “existential crisis” to his nation.
Lee flew out of Bangkok around the same time as another young British woman now facing drug smuggling charges.
Bella Culley, from County Durham, northeast England, was arrested in the former Soviet nation of Georgia on May 10 after allegedly flying to the capital, Tbilisi, via the United Arab Emirates with more than 30 pounds of marijuana and hashish in her luggage.
She is accused of “illegally purchasing and storing a particularly large amount of narcotics, illegally purchasing and storing the narcotic drug marijuana, and illegally importing it into Georgia,” the country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said in a statement earlier this year.
Sri Lankan authorities have warned of a huge increase in drugs arriving in the country via Bangkok.
“Another passenger who had left Bangkok airport, almost at the same time, was arrested in another country. We arrested this lady [Lee] based on profiling,” a senior Sri Lanka customs officer told the BBC.
“This has been a rule nuisance,” he added, referring to the drug scourge.
English (US)