10 years in jail for attempt to deliver drugs to detention centre 

DUBAI // A student has been jailed for 10 years and fined Dh50,000 for trying to smuggle heroin hidden in a bundle of clothes into the Rashidiya detention centre.

O S, a 20-year-old Emirati, visited the centre on August 18 last year to see an inmate.

He told police that a friend, H Y, had called him knowing he was planning the visit, according to court records.

H Y, he said, gave him a bundle of clothes and asked O S to give them to his inmate friend, to pass to another detainee at the centre.

But when the clothes were searched police found 1.02g of heroin hidden in a pair of trousers, according to K M, a police officer at Al Rashidiya police station.

“Yes, I possessed heroin,” O S told Al Saeed Mohammed Bargouth, the presiding judge at the Dubai Criminal Court of First Instance, “but I didn’t try to smuggle it to a detainee in Al Rashidiya.”

The court, however, found him guilty of both charges. He now has 15 days to appeal.

salamir@thenational.ae