A 50-year-old Turkish drug courier was yesterday jailed for 25 years and fined €100,000 after importing heroin worth €1.25 million, a record haul for Malta.
The 11.5 kilos of the drug were enough to supply a quarter of the island with heroin, according to the prosecution, which likened this to "mass genocide" because no one escaped the clutches of this narcotic.
Ismail Tirso, a former taxi driver and construction worker, arrived on a flight from Turkey via Sofia in October 2007 with the drug hidden in a false bottom of his large hard-cased luggage. The substance was packed neatly in two flat brown packages.
Acting on a tip-off, police officers searched passengers on every flight that day until the very last arrival, Mr Tirso, dressed in a suit, calmly placed his case into the X-ray machine. The packages were revealed immediately, Police Inspector Dennis Theuma testified on Tuesday.
In a statement to the police, Mr Tirso had said that a certain Jamal, whom he had known for only two weeks, had given him the case in Turkey and asked him to give it to a Maltese family as a gift. Jamal had promised him a job and a girlfriend who would marry him, he added.
Jurors returned with the verdict after three hours of deliberation, finding Mr Tirso guilty by seven votes to two of conspiring to traffic in drugs, importing the substance and possession of the drug in circumstances denoting it was not for his exclusive use. In submissions on punishment, lawyer Nadine Sant, from the Attorney General's office, said the drugs could be cut up into 115,000 sachets, which would mean that a quarter of the population of Malta could have had a sachet each. Since heroin was so addictive, this put a large number of people at risk. It could be described as mass genocide because nobody really recovered after using heroin, Dr Sant argued.
She noted that, last December, Jean Pierre Abdilla had been jailed for 16 years after he was found guilty of conspiring to traffic in one-and-a-half kilos of heroin and she asked Mr Justice Michael Mallia to take this into account when pronouncing sentence. Defence lawyer Malcolm Mifsud pleaded that his client was not a "kingpin" in some drug smuggling ring but actually the mule and so his involvement was limited. He asked the judge to take into consideration the fact that Mr Tirso had a clean police record.
Dr Sant rebutted that this meant nothing because one could not say whether he had a criminal record elsewhere, especially if he had only came to Malta for four days.
In handing down judgment, Mr Justice Mallia said he had taken into consideration the fact that this was the largest heroin haul ever and the potential effects on the population had it been sold.