Woman Arrested at Toronto Airport With 10,000 Diamonds Inside Her
February 23, 14(IDEX Online News) – A woman has been arrested at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport accused of hiding more than 10,000 diamonds inside her body.
Border officials found the woman, who arrived from Trinidad and Tobago, to be carrying 10,202 rough diamonds weighing 1,500 carats with an estimated value of $400,000, the Globe and Mail cited police as saying.
Helena Freida Bodner, a 66-year-old foreign national, was charged with four customs offences and two counts under the Export and Import of Rough Diamonds Act.
“At $266 a carat, those are stones of very good quality,” said Dorothée Gizenga, executive director of the Ottawa-based Diamond Development Initiative, a non-governmental organization.
“Considering the distance over which the person had to carry such a quantity of diamonds in the belly, from Trinidad to Canada, it is possible that the diamonds were ingested in Trinidad.”
The nearest source of diamonds would be Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana.
Venezuela removed itself from the Kimberley Process five years ago. Global Witness has claimed that millions of dollars in gems are smuggled out of Venezuela to neighboring Brazil and Guyana to be passed off as legitimate Kimberley Process approved diamonds.
The Financial Action Task Force, a Paris-based intergovernmental body that sets standards and promotes anti-laundering reforms, in a report last month identified Canada as one of countries that have seen major criminal cases where diamonds were used as a currency in the narcotics trade, money laundering and terrorism financing.
“In Canada, diamond money-laundering schemes appear to frequently relate to drug trafficking. Illicit financial flows are most often between Canada and the United States,” the report said.
In one case, the report said, illegal rough diamonds were smuggled into Canada, then smuggled again to another country to be cut, then legally sent back to Canada since the stones were passed off as legitimate stones.
“Once the diamonds have gone through the beneficiation process and the rough diamonds are cut and polished, it becomes almost impossible to determine the origin of a stone,” the report's authors wrote.