LBIZA: A Brit drug mule who tried to sneak a record 35,000 ecstasy tablets into Ibiza has been jailed for six years and fined almost half a million pounds.
Cops swooped on 38-year-old drug dealer Ian Smith when he turned up to claim a lost suitcase at an airport on the party island popular with British tourists.
Airport police ordered him to open the luggage, in which they discovered seven bags of the class A drugs worth £436,000.
Smith, originally from Ireland, was arrested on July 31 and cops seized the suitcase which he had checked onto a Vueling flight from Amsterdam a week earlier.
Officers then discovered £1,553 believed to have come from the sale of drugs during a search of his hire car.
He appeared in a provincial criminal court on Thursday on the neighbouring island of Majorca to admit to the drugs crime and agree to a plea bargain which saw him receive a reduced sentence.
Prosecutors wanted him jailed for seven years and five months and fined £850,000 if convicted after a trial.
The fine he has ended up being hit with is the amount prosecutors say he would have made from selling the drugs on the island to the tourists who flock there every summer.
It comes after drug mule Brits Melissa Reid and Michaella Connolly were arrested and jailed for six years and eight months in Peru after admitting trying to smuggle cocaine worth £1.5million from Peru to Spain.
The pair, known as the ‘ Peru Two ‘, were working in Ibiza when they claimed they were forced a gun point to board a flight with the 24lb stash of cocaine.
ReutersMichaella McCollum and Melissa ReidMichaella McCollum and Melissa Reid were caught in Peru trying to smuggle cocaine into Spain
The ecstasy tablets discovered inside Smith’s luggage had a purity of between 41 and 53 per cent.
State prosecutors said in an indictment handed to the court before the scheduled trial: “He planned to sell these drugs on the streets for a market value of £436,000.
“In the search of the hire car he went to the airport with, £1,553 from previous drug deals were found.”
His decision-making ability – said to have been hampered by years of drug abuse which had caused impulse control problems – were accepted as a mitigating factor.
The July 2015 drugs seizure was the biggest of its kind in Ibiza last year.
Initial reports at the time said Smith’s suitcase had been collected by airport workers and put into storage when he left it on a luggage carousel after arrival.
