The Drugs Project » Drug smuggler’s sentence cut for saving inmate’s life

Cannabis

Cocaine

Ecstasy

Heroin

News

Home » Cocaine, Heroin

Drug smuggler’s sentence cut for saving inmate’s life

Submitted by admin on Monday, 25 January 2010

A drug smuggler from Shropshire who plotted to bring cocaine and heroin into the UK has had his sentence reduced after saving an inmate’s life.

Naseer Zaman, 41, of Lilleshall, was serving 15 years after he admitted conspiring to import 10kg of drugs and assisting a drugs offender.

His sentence was cut to 12 years by the Court of Appeal on Friday when it heard he stopped a prisoner’s hunger strike.

The court heard he had also raised the alarm in a second jail suicide attempt.

The Crown said Zaman was the head of an organised crime group when he was sentenced at Wolverhampton Crown Court for his role in a plot to bring pure cocaine into the UK from Amsterdam.

‘Manifestly excessive’

In September 2006 he also helped a drugs runner escape a crime scene and sheltered him in a plot to bring 10kg of pure heroin into the UK from Turkey.

Zaman had already been given a reduction in his 22-and-a-half-year sentence for guilty pleas in 2008, but his lawyers argued on Friday that 15 years in jail was still too long.

Appeal judge, Lord Justice Maurice Kay said: “He was directly involved in assisting prison staff in talking a fellow inmate out of a hunger strike in November 2007.

“And there was an occasion in July 2008 where he raised the alarm in the face of an observation about an attempted suicide, which, in the circumstances, was prevented.”

Lord Justice Kay, sitting with two other justices, said there were limits to the amount of credit that could be given for personal mitigation.

But he said 15 years was “manifestly excessive” in Zaman’s case, following his guilty pleas and that he should not serve more than 12 years in prison.