Brit pensioner, 79, arrested with £200,000 worth of drugs in Chile after ‘being offered $5 million’

A 79-year-old Brit has been arrested in Chile after airport staff found £200,000 worth of crystal meth in his suitcase, and the pensioner claimed he'd agreed to carry the drug-laden suitcase after being promised he'd be paid $5 million.

The man initially claimed he didn't know how five kilos of methamphetamine had found its way into his luggage at Santiago International Airport after he'd disembarked a flight from Cancun in Mexico.

The man was taken into custody and remanded in prison, and The Times reports he is a Somerset man called William Eastment, who was due to fly to Australia the day after he was arrested in Chile.

Sergio Paredes, head of the Chilean PDI police force’s Anti-Narcotics Division, said: "The elderly British man we arrested claimed he had no idea his suitcase contained drugs when he was intercepted after picking it up from the luggage carousel and trying to enter our country with it.

"We interviewed him in English because he didn’t speak a word of Spanish and he alleged he had been deceived.

“He said he had received the suitcase from some Mexicans at the airport in Cancun before he boarded his flight and he claimed he had been promised a prize of five million dollars for delivering the suitcase to its final destination.

“He was even carrying a rudimentary certificate alluding to the prize."

The police said they believed the 79-year-old Brit was a 'drug mule in the pay of a criminal gang', and they are now investigating the gang that sent him.

Paredes added that the Brit faced 'probable charges and a trial' in Chile, with a court giving them the authority to look through his phone after they found evidence that he'd spoken to people in Brazil and the US.

A judge has ruled that the pensioner can be kept in jail for 120 days, so investigators have about four months to charge him with something that he could stand trial for.

If convicted of drug smuggling, the 79-year-old could be sentenced to 15 years behind bars, though legal experts in Chile have suggested he might only get five years if he is offered a plea deal.

Chilean authorities said that cocaine was the main drug smuggled through the country, but they 'receive a lot of lab-made drugs such as ecstasy and methamphetamine' from Europe.

Paredes said that the case had 'peculiarities', describing the pensioner as a 'frail-looking elderly person' who 'looked like a typical grandad', but stressed that airport security had learned that criminal gangs were 'increasingly using mules they think will be less likely to attract attention'.

He explained that the suitcase had a false bottom in which the five kilos of meth was hidden, and said they expected that the man would have received further instructions on what to do with the drugs once he left the airport.

Chilean customs director Rodrigo Diaz said an X-ray scanner picked up something suspicious about the man's luggage and marked it so when the man passed through customs they could spot it.

Upon initial inspection, the authorities found nothing, but then they discovered the false bottom in the suitcase that contained the meth.