Cocaine-Selling Colombians Sentenced
to Imprisonment in Moscow

MOSCOW (RIA Novosti) — The Russian interior ministry’s investigating committee reports that a verdict passed in relation to two Colombian and two Russian citizens who tried to sell a Latin American cocaine batch worth $1 million in Russia, has come into force.

Moscow’s Presnya district court has sentenced Colombia’s Ocampo Jimenez and Alvarado Bautist to 13 and 10 years of imprisonment correspondingly while Russia’s Valery Pavlenko and Rodas Luis were sentenced to seven years and six months in jail.

It has been found out that in 2001 Kaliningrad businessman Valery Pavlenko established contacts with Bogota drug barons’ representative though his acquaintance Luis, a Colombian who settled in Moscow.

Soon, 1.6 kg of cocaine was sent to Moscow from Colombia, in a batch of tights. But the drugs were discovered by French customs officers who notified the Russian interior ministry and the latter detained Pavlenko, the recipient of the cargo. It was revealed that foreign drug traffickers wanted to organize drug smuggling into Russia. This time intelligence agents passed themselves as buyers. When drugs melted in menthol oil and concealed in double-bottom barrels arrived in Moscow, they were recovered from the solution by chemist Alvarado Bautist who had come to the capital still earlier. Once the operation was over, the Colombians were arrested.