Trucker handed 8 ½ - year sentence for smuggling cocaine across border

A Metro Vancouver trucker caught with 30 kilograms of cocaine hidden inside his tractor- trailer as he crossed into Canada has been sentenced to 8 ½ years in jail.

Navdeep Singh Dhillon was found guilty in May of importing a controlled substance and possession for the purpose of trafficking. He was sentenced at the New Westminster Law Courts earlier this month, but the ruling was just released Wednesday.

B. C. Supreme Court Justice Murray Blok said the quantity of cocaine involved, as well as its purity, were aggravating factors, as was “the obvious planning and deliberation necessary to carry out this operation.”

“It was not a spur of the moment act on the part of the offender,” he said, adding Dhillon was motivated by greed. Working in Dhillon’s favour was the fact he had no related criminal record and that “the offence in question appears to have been a onetime event,” Blok said.

And Blok said Dhillon’s incarceration “will have a very negative effect on his family, who already live in very modest circumstances.”

Dhillon was searched by Canada Border Service Agency officers on April 17, 2009, as he returned from a trip to California with a rig full of almonds.

A detector dog and two CBSA officers found the packages of cocaine behind two access panels in the trailer’s refrigeration compartment. Also in the rig were the tools necessary to open the compartment where the drugs were found.

Blok heard the cocaine had a value of about $ 1.5 million.

Dhillon’s defence argued at trial that he was a “blind courier” who had no idea what was inside the truck.

But Blok found “Dhillon not only had control of the cocaine in the trailer, but that he also had knowledge of it.”