A Colombian woman and her boyfriend have been sentenced to 11 years in prison in Australia for trying to smuggle nearly four and a half pounds of cocaine into the country.
New Zealand based Jennifer Maritza Romero Maya and her boyfriend Geoffrey Kennedy were arrested in 2008 and will now serve a minimum sentence of seven years.
The couple were caught when they went to pick up a parcel of cocaine being tracked by police.
Police had intercepted two parcels of high-grade cocaine hidden in hydraulic cylinders in Germany on their way from Argentina to Australia.
They kept one parcel and allowed the other to continue to the Gold Coast, where the couple had arranged to pick it up.
The judge rejected the couple’s claim they were only involved because Romero Maya’s family had been threatened by a Colombian drug cartel, agreeing with the prosecution that it was no more than a “fanciful concoction.”
The cocaine, which was 87% pure, had a wholesale value of over $500,000 and a street value of over two million dollars.
