Irish drugs mule ‘lucky not to have got 20 years in jail’

Irish drugs mule Michaella McCollum was lucky she wasn’t put behind bars for 20 years, according to the Peru’s former drug czar.

A documentary is set to detail how the 20-year-old and fellow drugs mule Melissa Reid willingly agreed to smuggle a suitcase full of cocaine out of Peru to Spain.

The pair made headlines around the world when they were caught with 11kg of cocaine in Lima International Airport last summer and were later sentenced to six years and eight months behind bars when they finally came clean to police.

But Ricardo Soberon, the country’s top drug-fighting official until 2012, said their jail term was very lenient.

“Considering how Peruvian judges usually sentence against drug offences, receiving six years and eight months makes possible two things,” said the former drug czar. “The first one is in less than two years she will be able to ask for certain benefits. It hasn’t been a long sentence. If you see people who for nothing have 18, 20, 25 years, you see the disproportion of the legislation.

“I think she has been very lucky, because almost 40% of the Peruvian prison population haven’t got a sentence.”

The documentary, Michaella, Peru and the Drugs Run, explores how a young Irish woman agreed to become a drug smuggler after leaving her home in Dungannon, Co Tyrone, to make her first ever plane journey to Ibiza five weeks earlier.

Colonel Tito Perez, from the Peruvian Drugs Unit, told the RTÉ documentary they were recruited by a Columbian citizen known as Enrique.

“It was this person who made contact in Peru with the drug supplier.” He also said on the documentary that Scottish girl Melisa Reed seemed to be closer to the drugs gang.

“I think it was Melissa who directed (Michaella) to come to Peru, but on the orders of the drug traffickers.”

He said the authorities at the airport were alerted to the pair because they started to become “visibly nervous”.

The pair, who became known as the Peru Two, claimed for months that they agreed to take the drugs under threat, but in December they admitted their guilt and were sentenced to the lenient jail term.

The documentary follows her mother, Norah, and her sister, Samantha, on their first emotional 6,000 mile trip to Peru to visit Michaella, who is the youngest of a family of 10.

Soberon said there has been a “feminisation of drugs offences” with gangs targeting young women who are penniless as drugs mules. He said: “We have 67,000 people in Peruvian prisons; 3,000 of them are foreigners, at least 700 of them are women.

* Michaella, Peru & The Drugs Run is being broadcast on RTE One tonight at 9.35pm.