Sydney airport link to ice ring, claims arrested Aussie

An Australian facing execution in China for ice smuggling says Sydney Airport baggage handlers are part of a drug ring.

Peter Garnder

AN Australian facing execution in China for smuggling ice worth an estimated $10 million has claimed Sydney airport baggage handlers are involved in a sophisticated drug-trading ring operating between the two countries.

Peter John Vincent Gardner, 26, appeared in the Guangzhou Intermediate People’s Court yesterday after he was arrested in November carrying two bags containing 30kg of crystal methamphetamine in the city’s international airport.

Under Chinese law, Mr Gardner, who is a dual Australian-New Zealand citizen, faces the death penalty if found guilty.

Mr Gardner told the court he travelled to China with girlfriend Kalynda Davis, 22, who he had met just two months previously, to buy $13,000 worth of peptides and return them to Australia, primarily for his own consumption.

He said he believed the bags he and Ms Davis were given by two unidentified Chinese men in the Hilton Hotel lobby — and which they carried at the airport — contained four separate types of the performance-enhancing drugs.

Ms Davis was released without charge last year.

Mr Gardner admitted he had travelled to Guangzhou two months before he was arrested and bought similar stimulants, which are illegal to import into Australia without a Therapeutic Goods Administration permit. He said he had faced no problems leaving the country.

Under questioning, Mr Gardner, a carpenter, said a “friend” had organised both deals and had previously ferried drugs through Sydney airport using baggage handlers.

“I had worked on his house, I had built his mum’s house,” he said. “I drank with these guys, I partied with these guys — they were meant to be my mates.”

He claimed the baggage handlers were told of specific “bag tag” numbers and targeted inbound flights from Chinese airlines.

Mr Gardner told the court that, on his initial trip, he flew from Guangzhou to Sydney, where the bags were obtained by baggage handlers, before he transited to Auckland. The peptides were collected when he returned to Sydney shortly afterwards.

He said the organised ring consistently used bags that had been glued shut, with white shirts stuffed into the side compartments. “The white shirts were always packed around the drugs … if there was white powder on the bags then that was too much of a risk for the baggage handlers to take,” he said.

Mr Gardner said the first time he knew it was ice in the bags and not peptides was when Ms Davis was stopped by Customs officials at the Guangzhou airport.

“I had already gone through, I could have walked on to the plane and left Kalynda there with the bags,” he said.

“But I didn’t, I’m not a coward, I have never been a coward. When I saw it was ice my heart dropped, I panicked, I was worried. If you had said to me a year ago that I would be in a Chinese jail, I would have laughed at you.”

Mr Gardner, dressed in a grey suit and white open-necked shirt, sat in the court’s dock with his hands and feet shackled. His father­ and New Zealand diplomats were in court. Mr Gardner looked to his family a number of times during his testimony.

“I have bought great shame to my family, I have made my mum cry, I have made my sisters cry, I have cried,” he said.

Mr Gardner said he had not been paid by the ring to import the drugs on both of his runs, but there were “paybacks”. He claimed that the $13,000 worth of peptides he thought he was buying in November would have cost him at least $80,000 had he purchased them from separate online suppliers. However, it is estimated the ice found in the bags would have been worth at least $10m in Australia.

“There was an understanding … they will organise it and later, you know, I’m building them a pergola, or a back deck,” Mr Gardner said.

The trial finished late yesterday and the court has yet to set a date as to when a verdict will be delivered.

Mr Gardner has been in a Guangzhou detention centre for six months awaiting trial.

Additional reporting: Wang Yuanyuan