A pregnant British woman has been arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of trying to smuggle more than £3m of heroin out of the country, a crime that carries a life sentence or the death penalty.
Khadija Shah, 25, was due to fly from Islamabad home to Birmingham with her two children on Sunday morning.
"There are routine baggage checks for drugs," said a police officer based at the airport. "In the course of those, anti-narcotics officers found 123 packages of heroin in her luggage." The consignment was hidden in secret cavities in the luggage.
In all, the bags weighed 140 pounds – believed to be the biggest haul recovered at an airport in Pakistan.
She had spent six weeks on holiday with relatives in Pakistan with her children Aleesha Munir, four, and Ibrahim Munir, six.
Local media said during questioning she had given names of two other people who had asked her to carry the luggage.
Her boyfriend, Amar Ali, said she had agreed to carry someone else's bags. She told him that she had no idea what was inside the bags.
"I spoke to her on the phone but got cut off. I told her not to do that. I told her to trust no one," he told the Daily Mail from their home in the UK. "When I was there recently everyone there wants to be your friend because you're from England. People try to get you to take bags to the UK for them.
Although Pakistan still imposes the death penalty in some drugs cases, the penalty has not been carried out since 2008.
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