Brazillian Sex Worker Who Swallowed 101 Packages Of Cocaine To Smuggle Them To The UK Gets 4 Years In Jail

A Brazilian sex worker, who swallowed 101 packages of cocaine and tried to smuggle them to the U.K., has been sentenced to four years in jail.

Juan Irving Dos Santos Monteiro, 31, from Macapá in Brazil, was arrested at Heathrow Airport on Christmas Eve last year as he flew into Britain from Sao Paulo, said a report by Evening Standard.

An x-ray taken at the airport showed that Monteiro had ingested 101 packages of cocaine before getting on the 11-hour flight. The smuggled cocaine has a street value of more than $130,000.

Prosecutor Anisha Kiri told Isleworth Crown Court that Monteiro had claimed he was traveling to the U.K. for the holidays and would meet with a friend named Emily. "The defendant was taken for an x-ray which captured images indicating the presence of foreign objects in his abdomen. The defendant used a specimen exclusion retrieval toilet, where he produced 42 wrapped packages. Over the course of an hour, a total of 101 packages were produced. The purity of the drugs was 82 percent," she said.

Monteiro then confessed that he had swallowed around 100 packages of what he believed was drugs.

However, Monteiro's barrister Graham Lloyd told the Court on Jan. 28 that if any of the packages had burst during the long flight, that would have probably meant instant death for the accused.

"This is a crime of desperation. The position is far worse than the position here, and has led to financial devastation. It has had bad consequences for his employment as a sex worker. He tried to move his physical sex transactions to online sexual services, and he tells me that would be verified by his Twitter account on which he advertises sexual services," Lloyd added.

Monteiro said he had been working as a drug mule to pay off his debts during the pandemic. He had racked up debt worth around $2,700 back home. He will serve half his prison sentence in the U.K. before being deported back to Brazil.

Ian Truby, operations manager at National Crime Agency Heathrow, said organized crime groups use mules like Monteiro to smuggle drugs to the U.K.

"His was an important link in the chain from the producers and cartels in South America to the UK street gangs who sell these drugs. At every level throughout that chain, we see criminals engaged in violence and exploitation, which is why we are doing everything we can to target the networks involved in international drug trafficking," Truby said as per 7News.