South African national given six-year sentence
A South African national who was stopped by customs officers at Cork Airport and found to have 20 kilos of cannabis grass in his luggage with a street value of €200,000 was today handed a six-year jail sentence was imposed on him.
Judge Patrick J. Moran suspended the last two years of the jail term imposed on Johannes Steenberg (aged 43) of Corsen House, Fisher Street, Durban, South Africa.
Detective Garda Seán McCarthy said Steenberg arrived in Cork from Johannesburg via London on September 17 2007.
He was stopped by customs and later arrested by Garda Joe Young and charged with having cannabis at Cork Airport on Monday for the purpose of selling or supplying to others where the quantity of drugs exceeded €13,000.
This is the threshold figure for the mandatory sentencing of up to life imprisonment or a minimum of 10 years on conviction, unless a judge finds there are exceptional circumstances that enable him to depart from the mandatory provisions.
Det. Garda McCarthy said the defendant told gardaí that he had no drug addictions. He befriended a Nigerian shopkeeper with whom he later found himself in trouble and was told to go to Ireland to collect drugs.
However, when he got to the airport in Johannesburg he was handed the suitcase packed with drugs and told to bring them to Cork.
Defence senior counsel, Tim O’Leary, said the defendant was a courier and that in what he described as the increasingly cynical world of drug trafficking he was selected because he was white, and that respectable clothes were purchased for him in the hope that he would not alert the suspicions of customs officers.
Judge Patrick J. Moran said that the drugs represented a substantial amount and were likely to end up being supplied to the young people of Cork city and county.
