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A professional volleyball player who competed internationally on Canada’s women’s team has been jailed in Britain after arriving at a London airport with a suitcase full of vacuum-sealed cannabis.
U.K. border agents found Raekelle Powell, 22, carrying a suitcase jam-packed with 19 kilograms of cannabis after landing at Heathrow airport on a flight from Toronto on Sept. 20, Britain’s National Crime Agency said.
When she was asked about it, she said she was paid $300 to carry the suitcase. The drugs had an estimated street value in Britain of more than a million dollars.
Powell quickly pleaded guilty in court and last week she was sentenced to 15 months in jail at Isleworth Crown Court in London.
British authorities said Powell is from Toronto. She went to high school in Brampton.
She is an outside hitter in volleyball and was on Canada’s under-19 indoor volleyball team that took a silver medal at the NORCECA Championship in 2018, upsetting a favoured Cuba and finishing second to the United States. NORCECA stands for the North, Central America and Caribbean Volleyball Confederation.
Powell was arrested during a swarm of cannabis crossing attempts in London.
Eleven people were charged for attempting to smuggle 300 kilos of cannabis within two days at Heathrow and Gatwick, London’s two busiest airports.
Three others were arrested on the Saturday that Powell arrived, seven others the next day.
Two other Canadians are among those arrested. Charges against Christopher Duffell, 44, and Tania Fetherston, 51, who police allege arrived on a flight from Toronto via Copenhagen carrying 30.7 kilos and 34.7 kilos of cannabis in their luggage, are still before the courts.
It is a stark drug-smuggling trend and British authorities have issued warnings to travellers, particularly young people, not to carry suitcases they didn’t pack into the country.
Most of the smugglers arrived from Canada, the United States and Thailand, and most have no connection or relationship to the others.
Organized crime groups with access to cannabis grown where it is legal are smuggling it into countries where it is illegal and commands a significantly higher price.
Three times more cannabis has been seized in the United Kingdom so far in 2024 than during all of 2023.
“These sentences should act as a stark warning to anybody thinking of smuggling cannabis into the U.K. — you will be arrested, prosecuted and put into prison,” Piers Phillips, an NCA senior investigating officer, said in a written statement.
“The gangs responsible for this trade have no concern for the fate of the couriers they employ to smuggle the drugs. All they care about is maximizing profit and making their criminal enterprises viable.
“We continue to work with our partners at home, including Border Force, and those abroad to disrupt this trade and destroy the business model being used.”
Last month another Canadian athlete made unsavoury headlines, but on a far larger scale.
Former Olympic snowboarder Ryan Wedding was named in the United States as the boss of a billion-dollar transnational cocaine trafficking organization accused of moving massive amounts of drugs from Colombia, through Mexico and California into Canada, while protecting the operation with multiple unsolved murders, including several in Canada.
Wedding remains a wanted fugitive.
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