Convicted drug smuggler Cassie Sainsbury freed due to virus

Cassie Sainsbury freed halfway through sentence as Colombian authorities release prisoners to shield them from infection.

The Adelaide drug smuggler known as “Cocaine Cassie” has been freed from a Bogota jail just half way into her six-year sentence thanks to the coronavirus, with Colombian authorities releasing 4000 prisoners on humanitarian grounds to shield them from infection.

In a remarkable stroke of luck, 24-year-old Cassie Sainsbury – who was nabbed at Bogota’s El Dorado Airport in April 2017 smuggling 5.8kg of cocaine in 18 packages which she says she believed were headphones – is now a free woman.

She has celebrated her freedom with a tell-all interview with the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes in which she describes her ordeal as a learning experience.

“I can say that I grew as a person,” she says in the network’s teaser for Sunday’s show.

“I’ve grown up a lot. I learnt a lot about myself, I learnt a lot about people … I’ve learnt how to analyse people better.

“But at the same time, everything I’ve been through in prison, everything I’ve learnt, I wouldn’t change it because it’s made me a stronger person, it’s made me who I am today.”

Her release from Bogota’s notorious female prison, El Buen Pastor, was confirmed yesterday by her lawyer Orlando Herran.

It was Mr Herran who first revealed on Adelaide radio in 2017 that his client insisted that the 18 packages of cocaine had been dropped off at Sainsbury’s hotel by a mysterious figure called “Angelo” who had demanded Sainsbury carry the packages through Colombian customs and smuggle them out of the country.

She claimed Angelo had threatened to kill her entire family if she did not comply.

Cassie Sainsbury spoke to 60 Minutes. Picture: 60Minutes

However, Mr Herran told FiveAA at the time that “the grave problem” with his client’s case was that he had been unable to establish whether the man called Angelo existed.

“We do not have any proof that she really was tricked, or that this other person that she refers to exists or is guilty,” Mr Herran said.

To this day there continues to be no evidence of that fact.

The question is moot now as Sainsbury is free to tell her tale, which has raised speculation 60 Minutes may have paid for her story.

Sainsbury was originally facing 21 years in prison but both Mr Herran and her Adelaide lawyer Stephen Kenny, who also acted for Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks, managed to get the sentence reduced down to six after a plea deal was accepted by the fiscalia, as the District Attorney’s office is known in Colombia.

Her shock release on humanitarian grounds is the latest twist in an unusual life, where the young woman from the sleepy Adelaide beach suburb of Moana turned into a headline-generating machine after her arrest in Colombia.

It subsequently emerged that she had run a failed personal training business on SA’s Yorke Peninsula leaving a string of debts, had volunteered to be treasurer of the local tennis club in the tiny town of Coobowie after which $3000 in club funds went missing, and then popped up working in a gentlemen’s establishment in Penrith, western Sydney.

When she was initially jailed her Adelaide fiance Scott Broadbridge vowed to stand by her, with the pair even planning a wedding inside her Bogota jail.

That relationship soured and it emerged last year that Sainsbury had in fact become engaged to a fellow female inmate at El Buen Pastor, 29-year-old Venezuelan woman Joslianinyer Pico, who had nicknamed Sainsbury “Rapunzel” and proposed to her after a prison soccer match.

The pair told New Idea they intend to get married in Cartagena.

There is no prospect of Sainsbury returning home any time soon. Even with the COVID-19 travel restrictions, she is required to remain in Colombia for another 27 months as part of her parole conditions.