Indian-origin couple accused of double murder in Gujarat sentenced to 33 years in jail in UK | World News

An Indian-origin couple accused of organising a double murder in Gujarat have been jailed for 33 years each for smuggling 7 tonnes of cocaine worth £700m from London to Australia.
Arti Dhir, (59), a British Indian born in Nairobi, whose family hail from Gurdaspur in Punjab, and her husband, Kavaljitsinh Mahendrasinh Raijada, who is 14 years younger than her, an Indian national from Keshod, Gujarat, pleaded not guilty to exporting cocaine and money laundering but the jury at Southwark crown court unanimously convicted them of 12 counts of exportation and 18 counts of money laundering.
Raijada moved to the UK from India in 2010 to study. They met when Raijada was working as a carer for Dhir’s father after completing his MBA. At that time Dhir was working in the airline freight industry and she helped Raijada get a job in it.
“I am quite satisfied that this work enabled you both to see where the weaknesses in the system were and how you could exploit them for your own financial gain,” Judge Edward Connell said, describing them as a “ruthless team.”
The couple falsified paperwork to make their exports appear legitimate, to obtain airway bills and to defeat the security scanning system.
The couple forged the signature of Pankaj Patel to pretend he ran the illegal export business they set up in June 2015 even though he had left the UK. They also listed a Romanian cleaner with limited English, who Raijada was having an affair with, as a director.
They even claimed furlough money during Covid for the business. “You both played essential roles in the running of the company and both sought to blame other people who you claimed worked at the company even though all the evidence pointed to it being run by you two alone,” Connell said.
The business fell apart when one of the consignments was intercepted by the Australian authorities and found to contain 568kg of cocaine worth £57m. The prosecution estimate they smuggled 7 tonnes of cocaine to Australia on commercial aircraft worth £700m in total over 18 months.

They destroyed all the records of their business and material on their phones once the consignment was intercepted. The couple laundered the cash, converting some of it into gold, buying a car and a flat and opening 22 bank accounts.
The couple are also accused in India of paying assassins to murder 12-year-old orphan Gopal Sejani, who Dhir travelled to India to adopt in 2015, in order to get a payout from the Rs 1.3 crore insurance policy Dhir took out for him. Sejani and his brother-in-law were murdered by assassins in Keshod, Junagadh in 2017. In 2019 the London courts refused to extradite Dhir and Raijada.