German jailed for cocaine possession

Thursday, January 21, 2010 (Page 3)

THE Greater Accra Regional Tribunal yesterday sentenced a 49-year-old German to 14 years’ imprisonment with hard labour for possessing 7.078 kilogrammes of cocaine.
Heyne Frank, a marketing officer based in Nairobi, Kenya, was arrested at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA) on December 10, 2006 when he arrived at the airport to board an Ethiopian Airlines flight to Kenya.
He was convicted on two counts of attempted exportation of narcotic drugs without lawful authority and possession of narcotic drugs.
The sentences are to run concurrently.
Heyne had claimed he could not speak English and insisted on getting a German interpreter, for which reason the trial began in November 2007, instead of February 28, 2007.
His insistence on an interpreter resulted in the Judicial Service soliciting the services of an interpreter but the convict shocked the court on September 29, 2009 when he decided to speak English to enable the interpreter to travel outside the country.
The tribunal, presided over by Mr Justice Frank Manu, held that the prosecution had led enough evidence to warrant Heyne’s conviction.
After the court had summed up and convicted Heyne on all the counts, his counsel pleaded for leniency and urged the court to take into account the fact that the convict had been in custody for four years.
The facts of the case were that while the convict was undergoing departure formalities at the KIA, a sample trap was used to swipe his palm and then inserted in an itemiser machine.
The results proved that his hand had been contaminated with cocaine, resulting in his body being searched, but nothing was found.
Security officials then searched his travelling bag in his presence and, in the process, a quantity of a substance suspected to be cocaine was found concealed in it.
The substance was field-tested in his presence and it tested positive for cocaine.
It was then forwarded to the Ghana Standards Board (GSB) for analytical examination and a report issued proved that the substance was cocaine.