SINGAPORE: A 32-year-old man was sentenced to five years and four months in jail on Monday (Dec 18) and was handed five strokes of the cane. The man pleaded guilty to three charges of importing drugs, consuming drugs, and possessing a drug utensil in the form of a glass bong. A fourth charge of growing cannabis plants at a flat in Bedok was taken into consideration.
Singaporean Muhammad Dzulhilmi Bin Salimi imported candies containing drugs from a person in the United Kingdom, arranging for the purchase through Telegram and paying in Bitcoin through a third party. Dzulhilmi’s parcel was flagged by an Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA) officer who spotted anomalies while checking X-ray images.
Dzulhilmi got to know someone he called Nabil, who lived in the United Kingdom and sold cannabis and sweets containing tetrahydrocannabinol, the principal psychoactive constituent of cannabis. Tetrahydrocannabinol is a Class A controlled drug in Singapore.
Sometime before Oct 19, 2022, Dzulhilmi ordered 20 packets of sweets containing tetrahydrocannabinol from Nabil, paying him £200 (S$340) in Bitcoin through a friend named Omar, a CNA article reported. Dzulhilmi told Nabil to keep one packet for himself and repack the remaining 19 packets to look less suspicious. Nabil told him the packets looked fine, and there was no need to repack them. Nabil then shipped a parcel containing the 19 packets of drug-laced sweets to Singapore as registered mail.
Deputy Public Prosecutor Eugene Lau asked for five to six years in jail and five to six strokes of the cane for the drug importation offense, one year’s jail for drug consumption, and three months in jail for possessing a drug utensil. He said that the accused did not purely import the drugs for his consumption but had arranged to sell them to his friends.
For importing a Class A controlled drug, he could have been given up to 30 years in jail, with 15 strokes of the cane. For consuming drugs, he could have been jailed between one and 10 years, fined S$20,000, or both. For possessing a drug utensil, he could have been jailed for up to three years, fined S$10,000, or both.
Last week, the Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) said that a 37-year-old Singaporean man was arrested by the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency (SMPA) for suspected drug-related offenses in South Korea. The CNB added that on 9 April 2023, the man was arrested along with three other associates, two of whom are female Singaporeans, and the third a female of a foreign nationality.
The 37-year-old man is suspected to be involved in coordinating and supplying drugs to associates in Singapore for their subsequent trafficking and sale in Singapore using encrypted chat applications. The CNB added that according to immigration records, the man left Singapore on 12 Nov 2021. The statement by CNB said that the 37-year-old man had set up his base in South Korea to traffic drugs.
Read related: 37yo Singaporean man jailed in South Korea for operating international drug ring