MELBOURNE, 23 Aug 2019:
Former Malaysia Airlines cabin crew Fariq Aqbal Omar, 35, has had his jail sentence increased for smuggling drugs into Australia.
Instead of the five-year prison sentence meted out in April, the Victorian Court of Appeal reportedly said he will now serve the maximum eight year punishment – allowing an appeal by the Commonwealth Department of Public Prosecutions.
The Malaysian had cleared Customs at Melbourne Airport after a flight from Kuala Lumpur in May 2018 – but was seen on CCTV footage entering a bathroom with his suitcase, subsequently transferring the packages into his luggage.
Noticing this odd behaviour, airport security got Fariq and his colleagues to undergo checks again. He had been seen having rectangular bulges showing through the pants and vest of his airline uniform and when asked what they were, he replied: “I’m not sure, but I think it’s drugs”.
He later said he had been paid A$500 to import the packages, which were to be collected from a man at his hotel room. He also said he thought the packages were “shisha” or tobacco.
When seized by Aussie authorities, those bulges turned out to be 10 packages of pure heroin, with a street value of more than A$3 million.
Convicted on one charge of trafficking a commercial quantity of heroin, for carrying “nearly double” the commercial quantity of heroin, or almost 2kg of the drug, the appeal court judges said the original five-year prison sentence was “manifestly inadequate”.
In their appeal, Aussie prosecutors argued the sentencing judge had placed too much weight on Fariq’s personal circumstances, in particular that he would be isolated in prison because of his poor English skills, and that he would be apart from his wife and children, who live in Malaysia.
“Nothing in [Fariq’s] personal circumstances could have justified a sentence which was so out of kilter with sentencing standards,” the appeal court judges ruled.
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