3 Canadians caught smuggling cocaine into Australia

A dream cruise across half the globe has ended with a nightmare for three Quebecers who could face life in prison in Australia after local authorities allegedly discovered the equivalent of $30.5-million worth of cocaine in their luggage.

It was the last stop in a long voyage. When the MS Sea Princess reached Sydney harbour Sunday, after nearly two months of crossing two oceans, there were border agents, the Australian Federal Police, and sniffer dogs waiting.

The authorities weren’t there by accident. An exchange of information among several partners, including the Canadian Border Service Agency and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security led them to focus on this specific ship.

A search of the ship’s nearly 2,000 compartments allegedly lead to the discovery of 95 kilograms of cocaine in the suitcases of André Tamine, 63, Isabelle Lagacé, 28, and Melina Roberge, 22 — all originally from Quebec.

The two women were travelling together and left a steady record of their journey on social media. The investigators have not determined if they were also working alongside the man who was arrested. The three suspects were identified by the border agency as “high-risk travellers.”

Australia has a reputation for having higher local prices for cocaine, and the authorities estimated that the value of the drugs they discovered was $30.5-million (Canadian), a record seizure from a cruise ship in the country.

“The maximum sentence for this charge is life in prison,” the Australian Border Services said in a press release, which made reference to an international drug syndicate that is still subject to investigation and could lead to other arrests.

Investigators are trying to determine through which port the drugs were brought onto the ship. The three accused got on the ship in England in early July, but the cruise later travelled to several ports in North America, the Caribbean and South America — notably Colombia and Peru, two countries known for cocaine production.

Cocaine seizures have been on the increase in Australia in recent years. A report on illicit drugs published on Aug. 6 by Australia’s criminal intelligence commission said the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands and Canada are among the countries that send the most cocaine shipments to the country.

In 2011, the Sûreté du Québec noted for the first time that Canadian and Quebec-based cocaine traffickers had an interest in Australia, during an investigation targeting a consortium of individuals linked to the Hells Angels and an Irish organized crime group in Montreal.

According to sources, during a raid investigators found accounting documents at one of the members that led them to believe there were ties to a distribution ring in Australia.

During the bail hearing for this individual in May 2015, a Sûreté du Québec investigator explained that in this region of the world, a kilogram of cocaine cost three times as much as in Canada “because of the difficulty of getting it in.”

The investigator also noted that in their probe, one of the members, Frederic Lavoie, who has since been killed, exchanged encrypted text messages with an individual who asked if he had any drug mules available to send to Australia, and to obtain $160,000 for each kilogram of cocaine.

read more at The Star

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