Making Mules of Singaporean Women
In the last few years West African drug smugglers have been recruiting women from Singapore to smuggle drugs to countries overseas. Women are becoming among the many, arrested for the drug runs, as couriers. They enter the foreign countries under the pretext that they are meeting up with friends for a holiday. And the women believe the stories they tell. Persuaded by men from West Africa, who seduced them with the ideas of travel, money and love, more than fifteen women have been arrested for carrying drugs across borders in the last 4 months. Between the years of 2003-2007, only eight were caught. The Central Narcotics Bureau issued a statement warning women against these men promising what they not only can’t deliver, but what they will eventually let them take the fall for. Two women arrested three months ago are facing the death penalty. The syndicates are comprised for the most part, of men between the ages of twenty and thirty. They state during their luxury travel throughout Singapore, that they are successful car salesmen or businessmen. They meet the women in bars and clubs, or via chat lines or love lines on the Internet. They befriend the women and then put their lives at risk. Offered vacations and travel, many of these hardworking women simply don’t say no.
And many do not say no, because of the promise of love and friendship. Or cash. The women are usually asked by their new ‘friends’ or ‘lovers’ to travel from Singapore and pick up a drug stash in a different country. Then they are instructed to fly to a third and final destination. These drug kingpins are smuggling cocaine and heroin. Trouble is that many women eventually get stopped in such airports as those in Great Britain, Australia, China and Japan. One women, arrested in the Melbourne airport was carrying for her ‘boyfriend’ she had met three years prior. He told her that he was in the business of exporting electronic parts. Parts. After he was deported from Singapore back to Nigeria, he set up a ‘vacation’ in Bangkok. He suggested to her to that it was a good idea to swallow sixty four, rubber-wrapped pellets of cocaine and to smuggle them into Melbourne. This woman is now serving jail time, up to ten years of imprisonment. And her ‘lover’ remains at large. No doubt launching more operations on unsuspecting, hard working women of Singapore.
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