Sheriff jails one of new wave of female couriers

A YOUNG mother from Liverpool was jailed for four years at Lerwick Sheriff Court on Wednesday after she admitted smuggling heroin worth £21,000 into Shetland.

Virginia Creggy, aged 21, whose address was given as Cornton Vale prison, was stopped by police acting on a tip off as she travelled by taxi from Sumburgh airport to Lerwick on 7 April this year.

She was found to be carrying more than 1,000 pre-prepared wraps of the Class A drug inside her body and has been on remand ever since.

Last month the court was told that Creggy had built up drug debts for her cocaine habit to organised gangs in Liverpool, who had sent her up to the islands in return for writing off the £500 that she owed.

On Wednesday her defence agent Tommy Allan asked for her to be set free to stay with relatives in Southport, but Sheriff Graeme Napier had other ideas.

The sheriff has been dealing out harsh prison sentences to anyone caught importing hard drugs into the islands for the past three years, during which time a succession of drug runners from Merseyside have been arrested after police tip offs.

Sheriff Napier told Creggy that heroin has “blighted many young lives” in Shetland, which is seen as “a lucrative market by organised criminal gangs in the Merseyside area you come from even if from time to time a consignment is lost to the investigating authorities”.

He told her that anyone who ran up a tab for drugs would face a “day of reckoning when if you do not pay there may be repercussions”.

He added that he had noticed in the recent past a predominance of female couriers acting for the drugs gangs.

“I am not sure if there is any particular reason for that, whether for example it is thought that such a person will attract a lower sentence if caught. Some of those individuals are particularly vulnerable. Many like you have children,” he said.

He added that he would be failing in his duty if he did not impose a significant prison sentence, but reduced the jail term from six years to four because of Creggy’s early plea and backdated it to the time of her arrest.