Japanese police find 74 packets of cocaine inside foreign traveler complaining of stomach pains
Usually if you hear about someone stuffing a sock down the front of their pants, it's a guy wanting his package to be perceived as more prodigious than it really is. In April, though, customs officials at Osaka's Kansai International Airport learned that a woman who was trying to enter Japan had crammed a sock into the crotch of her clothing.
Apparently the bulge wasn't immediately visually apparent, but an officer noticed that the traveler, a 35-year-old Brazilian woman named Jessica Ramos de Souza, looked unusually tense while she was going through the standard customs process. She was then flagged for a more comprehensive examination of her luggage and person, which turned up 13 packets of cocaine, including a number that Souza had hidden inside the sock that she'd hidden inside her pants.
At some point in the examination, Souza began to complain of stomach pains, so she was taken to a hospital for a medical examination, and X-rays quickly determined the source of her discomfort: 74 more packets of cocaine, in condom-like encasings, which she'd swallowed, presumably in hopes of sticking to a timetable in which she would have passed through customs and been out of the airport quickly enough to get to a secluded space and expel the packets from her body before the discomfort became unbearable.
In total, Souza had 675.5 grams of cocaine on/in her when she entered Japan. Souza has been placed under arrest on charges of violating Japan's narcotics control act. She has admitted to smuggling the cocaine, but says that she had no intention of selling it, a claim which may or may not hold up as the authorities continue to investigate the original source of the drugs and potential accomplices.
It's probably a pretty safe assumption that SoraNews24 readers and international drug mules are two demographics with minimal overlap, but all the same, this is a good spot to remind everyone that Japan's criminal justice system does not fool around when it comes to drugs, and Souza's arrest not becoming public knowledge until more than a month after the incident means that anyone caught smuggling is likely to be sitting in lockup for a very long time even if they somehow manage to avoid going to trial.
Source: Asahi ABC News via Yahoo! Japan News, NHK News Web
Top image: Pakutaso
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