Cocaine Cassie’s mum hatches Corby-style escape plan

CASSIE Sainsbury could be out of jail and living in Bogota with her mum in six months under an audacious Schapelle Corby-style escape plan.

Her lawyer Orlando Herran said Sainsbury’s mum Lisa Evans and her partner were “seriously pursuing” a plan to move to Bogota and sponsor her in home-based detention, which will be on offer after she has been in jail for a year.

Sainsbury, 22, was yesterday fined $130,000 and sentenced to six years jail, which could be cut in half with good behaviour, for trying to smuggle almost 6kg out of Bogota Airport on April 12.

Sainsbury has offered several versions of how she came to be carrying the drugs, but a judge yesterday accepted her most recent story – that she had been threatened into the crime.

She had said a mystery man named Angelo tricked her after she agreed to transport documents from Bogota to London, instead packing drugs into her suitcase and threatening her family.

“She isn’t a criminal. She made a mistake, she allowed herself to be tricked and she didn’t use the means at her disposal by not asking authorities for help,” Mr Herran said in Spanish outside the court.

Mr Herran spoke to media shortly after the hearing ended and because the court was closed to media, his is the only available version of events.

He said the judge believed Sainsbury was a small part of a significant criminal gang who had threatened her family in order to make her smuggle the drugs.