Man who hid blades in butt to be sentenced

A man who claimed he was kidnapped, forced to insert marijuana and two knife blades up his rectum and ordered to smuggle the items into the Thorold jail will learn his fate in December.

Kidus Dawit was found guilty in Ontario Court of Justice in St. Catharines earlier this year to charges of possession of marijuana and carrying a concealed weapon.

At a sentencing hearing Tuesday, assistant Crown attorney Stacey Sheehan asked Judge Peter Wilkie to impose a jail term of 18 months for the weapons offence.

Smuggling a weapon into a detention centre, she said, is “a recipe for death and aggravated bodily harm.”

The judge said assaults within institutions “is common place in this jurisdiction” but it typically involves fights using “hands and feet” and not knives.

Defence counsel Donald Wolfe on Tuesday said his 30-year-old client was not planning on using the items he attempted to bring in, rather he was delivering the contraband to someone else.

“He’s more of a mule than anything,” he said.

Wolfe said a sentence of time served followed by probation would be a more appropriate penalty, adding the Fort Erie man had spent the equivalent of more than 300 days in pretrial custody.

At trial, Dawit had testified that several unknown people confronted him at a residence in Niagara and drove him to Hamilton.

He said he was forced at knifepoint to insert what he was told were packages of tobacco.

He said he was instructed to deliver the contraband to unnamed inmates at Niagara Detention Centre. If he failed to deliver, he was told he’d be assaulted by the intended recipients inside the jail.

Two packages were seized. One contained a condom filled with marijuana and the second package had two four-inch-long ceramic knife blades. Ceramic blades are undetectable by metal detectors. The judge dismissed Dawit’s kidnapping claim.

Dawit is scheduled to return to court Dec. 5 for sentencing.