Narcotics smuggler has not yet met her family

Bredtveit kvinnefengselBredtveit kvinnefengsel.Photo: wikimedia.org

Just over a week ago, a 53-year-old Norwegian woman convicted of drug smuggling in Ecuador came home to Norway. She hasn’t yet met her family.

Rita Grimestad was sentenced to ten years in prison for attempting to smuggle nearly three kilograms of cocaine from Ecuador in February 2014.

After three years of incarceration in Ecuador, she returned to Norway on the 12th of April to finish the rest of the sentence here. According to NRK news, she hasn’t yet met anyone in her family during the week she has spent at Bredtveit Women’s Prison in Oslo.

‘The process of making a visit has been heavy. The way isn’t clear yet,’ said family lawyer, Nils Arne Grønås. She plans to meet her family for the first time on Saturday.

Grimestad was stopped at Quito airport with almost three kilograms of cocaine hidden among the luggage in her suitcase.

She has always insisted on her innocence, and said she believed she would be carrying important documents for the man she loved, whom she’d met via the internet two and a half years earlier. She had also transferred 600,000 kroner to the man.

 

Source: NTB scanpix / Norway Today