Conviction handed down in case of attempting to import a large quantity of cocaine

Yesterday, the Primorsky District Court sentenced a group of drug traffickers who tried to smuggle a large shipment of cocaine from the Dominican Republic to Russia. Three failed smugglers were found guilty of attempted drug smuggling (Part 3 of Article 30, Part 2 of Article 188 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - Kommersant ) and sentenced to four years in prison.

As the city prosecutor's office told Kommersant, residents of St. Petersburg Igor Ionitsa, Maxim Markovich and Stanislav Shutov decided to make money on drugs in 2009. Mr. Ioniza invited his friend, who, according to his information, had serious connections in the customs authorities, to smuggle drugs that had arrived on an air flight from the Dominican Republic through the customs control zone at one of the international airports. “On December 1, 2009, in the Shokoladnitsa cafe in St. Petersburg, a meeting between Ionitsa and Markovich took place with an acquaintance, who in fact was an operative officer of the Federal Security Service of Russia for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region. During the meeting, Ionitsa gave the acquaintance 5 thousand euros as payment for taking out cocaine, and Markovich - a photograph of the courier and a conditional phrase that had to be uttered when meeting in the baggage claim area,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. While the accomplices were negotiating with the security forces to accept the cargo in Russia, another attacker, Shutov, held successful negotiations with “foreign partners” and, as a result, as the court found, received from an unidentified person in the Dominican Republic five briquettes of cocaine with a total weight of more than 5 kg. with whom he flew to Moscow. On December 4, 2009, an FSB officer participating in the operational search event gave dummies of five briquettes of the narcotic drug to Ionitsa, receiving 25 thousand euros from him. Immediately after handing over the trunk, which allegedly contained cocaine, to the smugglers, security officers detained the criminals. The investigation into the case lasted about two years - the guards had to collect evidence, work out the foreign connections of drug dealers and check for their involvement in such crimes. As a result, the court decided to sentence Jonitsa to three and a half years in prison, and Shutov and Markovic to four years in prison.

Vladislav Litovchenko

Drug dealers ran into a security officer