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| Europe |
| Saudi prince gets 10-year sentence |
| 2007-05-10 |
| Saudi Prince Nayef Al-Shaalan was sentenced in absentia yesterday to 10 years in jail on charges of involvement in a cocaine smuggling gang, at the outcome of his trial in France. The 53-year-old prince, who is not in line for the Saudi throne, was one of 10 people handed jail terms of four to 10 years in connection with an operation which landed two tonnes of cocaine at an airfield outside Paris in 1999. The judge ruled to uphold international arrest warrants against Prince Nayef and the nine other defendants, who include three former Colombian drugs barons. Prince Nayef was convicted of illegally importing drugs, of complicity in the transport, detention and provision of drugs and of criminal conspiracy. He is accused of using his diplomatic immunity to smuggle drugs to France on board a private jet. A grandson of Saudi Arabia's founding monarch Abdulaziz and son-in-law to the Saudi deputy defence minister, the prince denies any involvement in drug trafficking. A Saudi representative at the hearing said he intended to appeal. The investigation leading to his prince's conviction began in June 1999, when police acting on a tip-off seized 800 kilos of cocaine with a street value of $30 million a raid near Paris. Prince Nayef - who is alleged to have made contacts with Colombia's Medellin cartel while studying at the University of Miami in the early 1980s - is accused of providing a jet to transport the drugs from Colombia to Paris. He was indicted on the basis of testimony from three former Colombian drug barons - Oscar Eduardo Campuzano Zapata, Juan Gabriel Usuga Norena and Carlos Alfonso Ramon Zapata - as part of a plea-bargain in a separate drugs trial in the United States. The Colombians, also convicted in absentia by the Paris court, were respectively handed four-, nine- and 10-year jail sentences. They and Prince Nayef were ordered to jointly pay a total fine of 80 million euros ($110 million) to the French customs service. A Spanish art dealer and financier, Jose Maria Clemente, was handed a five-year sentence for taking part in a conspiracy with the aim of importing drugs. Five other defendants, Mario Oller-Martinez, Jean-Francois Tixador, Wilson Rodrigo Jimenez Montanez, Humberto Gomez Maya and Edgar Augusto Gutierrez Guevara, were given 10 years on the same charges as the prince. - AFP |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #2 Here is the book (in french, of course), just for the record. |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2007-05-10 14:54 |
| #1 IIRC, a french journalo wrote a book about that particular case, arguing that it was not a persoanl venture, but part of a larger drug ring whose profits were re-injected as "black money" into saudi ops in France. |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2007-05-10 14:52 |