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Bag Tracked Before Drug Bust.
By admin | November 3, 2004
From Cindy Wockner (in Bali)
The Daily Telegraph
November 4, 2004.
He has been a Customs officer in Bali for 20 years and will be a witness at the drug-smuggling trial of an Australian woman.
Gusti Ngurah Nyoman Winata was monitoring an X-ray machine out the back of Bali’s international airport when he noticed something suspicious in a bag.
Mr Winata followed at a discreet distance to see who collected the luggage.
It was Mr Winata who approached Schapelle Leigh Corby and asked her to open the bag, allegedly revealing 4.1kg of marijuana in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag.
He says Ms Corby was nervous and panicky at the time and tried to stop him from opening the compartment of the bag containing the marijuana.
He also says that when he saw the plastic bag full of marijuana, he asked Ms Corby, “What’s this, do you know what this is?”
He said she replied, “Yes, that’s marijuana”.
“I asked,’how do you know that’s marijuana’ and she said, ‘when you open it I know from the smell’,” he said.
Ms Corby denies any knowledge of marijuana in her luggage.
She has repeatedly said she is innocent of the charges laid against her.
Her lawyers are working to build a case that the drugs were planted.
The 27-year-old beauty therapy student from Queensland’s Gold Coast has been in Denpasar’s police headquarters jail since she was picked up at the airport.
This week, police handed a dossier of evidence against Ms Corby to prosecutors.
Her trial could start within months.
If prosecutors choose to use Indonesia’s toughest narcotics law and accuse her of importing and controlling the drugs to sell or traffic, she could face the death penalty.
Police will ask the Indonesian Agriculture Department to conduct more tests on the marijuana to determine its strength and whether it came from Australia or Indonesia.
Bali’s chief narcotics detective Lieutenant-Colonel Bambang Sugiarto said police had information that a similar kind of marijuana, known locally as “lemon juice”, had been sold in Bali.
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