The specialised chamber for international crimes at the High Court
in Rwanda, on Thursday, February 15, sentenced a Nigerian woman to six
years in prison for drug trafficking.
Priscilla Duru was arrested at Kigali International Airport in
October 2016 as she tried to smuggle1.3 kilograms of heroin through
Kigali en route to Nigeria.
During the hearings, she denied the charges arguing that she was
given the bag by a Tanzanian woman and didn’t know the contents of the
bag. Reading the verdict, the presiding judge Alice Rulisa said that the
court had established that Duru entered the country to wait for another
person to give her the narcotics from Tanzania so that she could
transport it to Nigeria.
High Court ruled that the suspect was well aware of the contraband,
waited for over a month in Rwanda before the bag containing the drugs
was brought to her. Duru, who was in tears during the reading of the
verdict, had previously begged for clemency adding that if she knew that
she had been given drugs, she would have alerted the police before
leaving Kigali as she indicated that she only came in Kigali after she
was asked by a “family friend” who owns a pharmacy in Nigeria to carry
for him a bag with a certain medicine called Ephedrine.
She claimed that she had approached him for help because she needed
to cater for her children after losing her husband. Court ruled that
she will have to serve six years in Muhanga Prison, and pay two million
Rwandan francs in fines.
Although at the time of her arrest, Duru claimed she didn’t know
what she was carrying, when she appeared in court in January, 2017, she
admitted that she was carrying heroin and begged for mercy.