Cost crushes young prisoner's hope of transfer to Australia
A young Australian woman who has spent the past three years in a Hong Kong jail after being convicted of drug smuggling has been denied the chance to return home under a prisoner exchange scheme.
Sydney hairdresser Rachel Ann Diaz, 21, was sentenced to 10 years in jail after she was caught in a Hong Kong hotel room preparing heroin to smuggle on a flight back to Australia.
The court was told that she and two accomplices were intending to swallow the drugs in 114 condoms.
The 700 grams of heroin had an estimated street value of A$1 million (HK$7.35 million).
Now Diaz has been granted approval to serve the rest of her sentence in Sydney, under the terms of a prisoner exchange scheme agreed between Hong Kong and the Australian government last year.
But the New South Wales state government, which has agreed to take her, has refused to pay for her flight home and an officer to escort her. The young woman's parents say they cannot afford the bill, which would exceed A$10,000.
Now the Foreign Prisoner Support Service has launched a campaign to raise the money to bring Diaz home. Family advocate Kay Danes said the young woman's parents were desperate to see their daughter returned to Australia.
'The bottom line is that if the Diaz family don't come up with the money to pay for her transfer, then Rachel will stay indefinitely in a Hong Kong prison until her sentence is complete,' she said.
'Her father has no money to even visit his daughter and this is quite devastating on him, Rachel and her two young brothers, not to mention her mother.'
Her family insists that Diaz, who was only 17 at the time of her arrest, is not a hardened criminal.
They allege she was sexually assaulted at the age of five, raped by an uncle at the age of 12 and has no previous convictions.
Ms Danes said the family was prepared to repay the NSW government for the cost of the air travel, but was unable to raise the money at the moment. The young woman's mother did not work and her father had only recently been re-employed after losing his job.
Diaz was recruited to smuggle the heroin after being told she would be paid up to A$7,000.
