LAHORE: A sessions court on Wednesday sentenced a Czech woman arrested last year on charges of attempting to smuggle heroin from Pakistan to Abu Dhabi to eight years and eight months in jail.
Additional Sessions Judge Shahzad Raza issued the verdict against 21-year-old Tereza Hluskova. The co-accused in the case, Shoaib Hafeez Khan, was acquitted due to reasonable doubt surrounding his role in the smuggling bid.
Television footage and pictures showed that the model broke down in court after hearing the verdict of her case. She was shifted to a women jail by the police.
Her lawyer Sardar Asghar Dogar said she will appeal. Hluskova was convicted during a court appearance last week. Her sentence also includes an 800 dollar (£605) fine.
Since her arrest on January 10, 2018, Hluskova has told investigators that she came to Pakistan to work as a model, but someone put eight and a half kilogrammes of narcotics into her luggage as she was returning.
She was arrested as she tried to board a flight for Abu Dhabi. Czech diplomats had provided her legal assistance. Over the course of her trial, nine witnesses had recorded their statements against the accused.
Her facilitator was also arrested who said that Hluskova teamed up with her brother’s friend to smuggle drugs from Pakistan to foreign countries various times before getting caught by the airport authorities.
The model, however, ruled out the accusations, saying in her defense that she was visiting Lahore for some modeling assignments and was unaware that someone put the drugs in her bag.
Earlier this year, in January, a foreign PhD student was taken into custody by customs staff after narcotics were found in his luggage during check-in at the new Islamabad International Airport.
Customs staff recovered 325 grammes of cocaine disguised as sweets and arrested the student Ifenaye Junior Aloja, who is a PhD student in a private university of Islamabad. He was moved to Customs Headquarters for legal proceedings.
