A bowls-loving British pensioner accused of smuggling £200,000 of meth into Chile claims he was tricked by scammers who told him he’d won a £3.7million prize.
William ‘Billy Boy’ Eastment, 79, was arrested in May after allegedly trying to enter the country on a flight from Mexico with more than five kilos of the class A drug hidden in a false bottom of his suitcase.
The Welshman is currently being held in the notoriously tough Santiago 1 Penitentiary while investigators try to identify the drug traffickers they believe he may have been working for.
If convicted Eastment, who lives in Milborne Port, Somerset could face five years behind bars, according to Chilean legal experts.
Last night, new details emerged of the prisoner’s extraordinary claim that he was duped into carrying the drugs – insisting he had been ‘deceived’ by strangers who promised him a multi-million pound reward.
Sergio Paredes, head of the PDI anti-narcotics unit at Santiago airport, said Eastment told officers he had been handed the suitcase by a stranger in Mexico shortly before boarding his flight.
‘He alleged he had been deceived,’ Paredes said after the arrest on May 26.
‘He claimed he had been promised a prize of £3.7 million for delivering the suitcase to its final destination – and was even carrying a rudimentary certificate referring to the prize.’
‘He told us he was going to spend the night in Santiago and fly to Australia the next day,’ the officer added.
New court documents show Eastment is blaming a mystery woman called Carolina – who he says posed as an International Monetary Fund (IMF) official – for luring him into the alleged smuggling plot.
In a submission earlier this year, his defence lawyer said Eastment has received emails from the IMF claiming a relative in New Zealand had died and left him an inheritance, and that he needed to travel to Auckland to sign documents.
The IMF has repeatedly warned the public about scams of this kind.
Believing the messages to be genuine, and having relatives in New Zealand, Eastment set off- a journey recorded in the police file.
His route included a stop over in Mexico City, where Carolina allegedly appeared at his hotel with documents he needed for New Zealand and a locked suitcase she said contained gifts.
She did not give him the key.
Although earlier reports suggested Eastment could face up to 15 years in jail, Chilean legal experts say a five-year sentence is more likely – and that he could receive a reduced term if he co-operate under a plea-bargain agreement.
Prosecutors have been authorised to extract data from his mobile phone and Samsung tablet to identify who he was communicating with before his arrest.
Eastment has already suffered a major setback in his attempt to escape his South American jail ordeal.
A judge initially granted his plea to swap prison for house arrest in the Chilean capital – backed by medical reports citing pneumonia, frailty and threats from inmates – but the order was overturned just a day later.
An appeals court sided with state prosecutors, who argued he remained a flight risk and should stay behind bars while investigators seek to extend the 120-day window they were given to build the case against him.
A decision on the extension request is understood to be pending.
Eastment’s younger sister Jennifer, 78, described him as ‘gullible’ after learning he had been detained on drug-smuggling allegations.
‘If someone gave him a story like that about needing something delivered and he would get paid for it, he wouldn’t think about drugs,’ she told the Daily Mirror.
‘You would not believe that someone so intelligent and top of the class growing up could be so stupid and have so little common sense.’
She revealed he had previously fallen victim to a scam four years ago, losing £20,000 to a Nigerian fraudster claiming to be a woman in legal trouble abroad.
‘He sold his car, gathered all the money he could, and sent it to her. Funnily enough, he never heard from her again,’ she said.
