LILONGWE, Sept. 15 (Xinhua) -- A magistrate court in Lilongwe, Malawi, Thursday sentenced 44-year-old Angolan, Joad Matateu Manuel, to five years imprisonment with hard labor for attempting to smuggle cocaine through Kamuzu International Airport, KIA.
Police Spokesperson for KIA, Sgt. Sapulain Chitonde, said in a statement made available to Xinhua that Manuel, who hails from Luanda in Angola, was arrested on August 30 at KIA when he was about to board Kenya Airways en-route to Nairobi.
Upon search of his travelling bags Manuel was found with male condoms containing a liquid which, when examined by the country's National Quality Control Laboratory, was confirmed to be cocaine weighing 2.1 kg.
Manuel pleaded guilty before court, according to the police spokesperson, hence the five-year jail term sentence.
"The State, through Deputy Director of Prosecution, asked the court to pass an immediate custodial sentence of not less than five years considering that drug traffickers are people with money and a fine would mean nothing to the convict," said Chitonde.
He continued: "The state further stressed in the court that Malawi government would never allow to be used as a transit country for dangerous drug dealers and that the Angolan sentence should send warning shots to any would-be-offenders."
Manuel through his lawyers, pleaded for a suspended sentence saying he could not understand any language apart from Portuguese and that he suffers from hypertension and custodial sentence would do more harm to him.
But the state said Malawi prisons were already keeping convicts with language barriers like Manuel and that the Angolan case would not be unusual.
On health services, the state said there was fully fledged health facility at Maula Prison where the Angolan would be confined to serve his jail term and that the facility would take care of Manuel's hypertension problem.
The drug was forfeited and destroyed right at the court, according to the police spokesperson, and after serving his sentence, the convict will be deported to his country and he will also be declared a prohibited immigrant in line with section 4 of the Immigration Act.
