KUALA LUMPUR, 30 Jan 2009: A man from Peru was sentenced to death by the High Court here after he was found guilty of cocaine trafficking, two years ago.
Judicial Commissioner Azman Abdullah passed the sentence on Amasifuen Tello Reyes, 30, after finding the defence had failed to raise any doubts in the prosecution’s case.
Reyes was ordered to enter his defence by Azman on Wednesday after the court ruled that the prosecution had established a prima facie case against him.
He was charged with trafficking cocaine weighing 714 grammes along the roadside near Jalan Sultan here at about 7.30pm on 15 May 2007.
According to the facts of the case, a police team acting on a tip-off trailed Reyes from Kuala Lumpur International Airport after he arrived on a transit flight from Buenos Aires to Singapore.
Initially, the officers in the team, who had stopped Reyes immediately after he stepped out of a taxi at the scene, did not find any drugs on him after conducting a body search.
Reyes was then brought to the Kuala Lumpur Hospital and an X-ray revealed that there were more than 100 small tubes in his stomach.
He was admitted for four days at the hospital to “flush out” the tubes and a total of 114 tubes were recovered. Further examination on the tubes confirmed they contained cocaine.
Reyes’s counsel Tharamjit Singh told the court that Reyes had been jobless for about six months after he was retrenched from a factory in his hometown. He was lured by a drug syndicate which had offered him USD$3,000 (RM10,000).
Deputy public prosecutor Ahmad Fuad Othman argued that the law was very clear, whether the accused was local or foreigner, the only punishment for drug trafficking in Malaysia was the mandatory death sentence. — Bernama
