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Grandmother ‘sentenced to death’ for drug trafficking
An Australian woman, Maria Elvira Pinto Exposto, who is a mother of four and also a grandmother, has been sentenced to death by hanging after a Malaysian court on Thursday found her guilty of smuggling drugs in her bag.
The sentence comes a few months after she was acquitted of the drug charges on grounds that she didn’t know there was crystal methamphetamine in her bag when she was arrested in December 2014 at Kuala Lumpur’s international airport.
The grandmother was handcuffed in court where she was consoled by her lawyers and Australian Embassy officials after the verdict, News Corp reported.
She had claimed she was the victim of a set-up after she was found with the drugs in her bag after arriving on a flight from China.
The three judges sitting in Kuala Lumpur unanimously found the 54-year-old guilty but said she had a right of further appeal on the methamphetamine charges and wished her luck, News Corp Australia reported on Thursday.
“We find the merits of the appeal, we allow the appeal and set aside the judgment of the judge and find her guilty as convicted. The only sentence under law is death by hanging,” the judges found.
Exposto’s lawyer Shafee Abdullah told her it was a temporary setback and “you will win and you will walk away” following a further appeal.
The 54-year-old Australian grandmother had traveled to China in 2014 in hopes of meeting her boyfriend, a man she’d met online years before who claimed to be Capt. Daniel Smith, a U.S. service member. She had fallen deeply in love with him, she said, and flew to Shanghai to at last see him in person. He never showed up.
Upon leaving Shanghai, Maria Elvira Pinto Exposto was approached by a stranger, who asked her to take a backpack back to Melbourne. She said yes. Then, while changing flights at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, she mistakenly went through immigration. She volunteered her bags for customs inspection.
That’s when officers discovered a secret compartment stitched into the backpack that contained 1.1 kilograms of crystal meth.
Last December, Exposto was cleared of the charges. It was a rare twist of fate in the Muslim-majority country, where hundreds of people have been sentenced to death in recent years for drug trafficking.
