Aussie was moments from flight

she was until she arrived at immigration and it came up on the system. Before that we were none the wiser.

“She had cleared security and checked her bag.

“The alert said check this person so we pulled her aside and we searched her luggage and we arrested her. We asked ‘is this your bag, did you pack this’, she said ‘yes’.”

The DEA alerts Colombia’s national police several times a month of suspected drug mules, Commander Soler said, declining to detail anything further about the operation.

Cassie has told her family in Australia she thought she was carrying home packages of headphones to give as presents at her upcoming February wedding, and that she was given them by a local man she had befriended on a short break in Colombia.

At first she was calm, choosing not to answer questions fired at her about the 18 bags of cocaine in her suitcase.

But as the seriousness of the situation dawned, the former personal trainer and volunteer firefighter became upset, Commander Soler said.

“In general, drug mules, once they have been found out they start crying,” he said.

“You see a change in their attitude, sometimes they are perhaps aggressive and then they realise the crime they have committed and enter a state of surprise and panic, it’s a different reaction for different people.

“But she co-operated. Generally the reaction is to be sad and then to begin denying it, then they think and start talking about why they did it, their needs, they don’t have a job.

“But with her, because of the language barrier this didn’t happen. She was in general terms calm and simply took an attitude of silence. She seemed surprised – and then she was very sad, crying.”

As one of 46 foreign drug mules arrested by Commander Soler’s officers this year, Cassie has been swept into the vast and bewildering bureaucracy of the justice system in South America’s cocaine capital.

Criminal lawyer Franciso Freyle Matiz, who has practised in Bogota for 25 years, said she should plead guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence than the 25 years she has been told she faces.

He says Cassie has been charged under Law 30, and the fact she admitted she packed the suitcase means she has no claim of innocence.

“Unfortunately this is a very common story. We have heard this story before of accidentally taking something from someone you trusted,” he said.

“It is a very weak defence and in the eyes of Colombian law, this is no defence.”