The man from southern Sweden had already made it halfway through his journey between Brazil and Sweden when his fake leg casts finally gave him away while he was getting on a connecting flight in Dubai in March this year.
“When I searched him I felt something hard around his leg. I asked what it was and he told me that his leg was broken,” Abdullah Hassan, one of the customs officials that caught the Swedish drug-smuggler told online newspaper Emirates 24/7.
The suspect's bluff was called when the official asked the man to provide a medical certificate and he responded by getting up and trying to run from the scene.
“Both of his legs were in plaster casts from the thighs down, but the knees had been left uncovered so that he could move,” the official recalled, saying the Swede then tried to bribe him to avoid questioning.
“An airport medic then established that it was a trick and that the passenger had not broken his leg. Then we discovered that his thighs were bandaged where he had fastened eight packets of drugs.”
A court in Dubai has convicted the man of drug trafficking, sentencing him to a 10-year-long prison sentence, widely reported in the Swedish media on Thursday.
“We’re happy that he only got 10 years, it could have been a lot worse,” the man’s brother told Swedish tabloid Expressen.
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