by Oke Efagene

A Nigerian, Abraham Shodiya, has been locked up in a detention facility in Ireland for his role in a cocaine operation worth €29 million.

A father of four was sentenced yesterday by Judge Desmond Hogan of Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, to 12 years imprisonment, with 2 years suspended and backdated to when he entered custody last year June.

Shodiya, 44, was also unanimously convicted of the offence in November after an 11-day trial.

According to reports:

He had been charged with four charges of possessing cocaine for sale or supply and two charges of possessing cocaine at Enterprises Services Unit 1, Old Quarry Campus, North West Business Park, Ballycoolin and Maldron Hotel, Kiltipper on June 26, 2012.

At his trial, Detective Garda Eoin Roche of the Garda National Drugs Unit (GNDU) said that Shodiya was arrested with almost 43kg of cocaine in wheelie bins on a trailer attached to a vehicle at the Maldron Hotel in Dublin. Another 378kg of the drug was seized at the Ballycoolin warehouse.

 Roche told the court that Shodiya was the “right hand man” of entrepreneur Gareth Hopkins (34) who received a 15- year sentence with two suspended earlier this year after pleading guilty to the crime.

Hopkins, during his trial, had told the jury how he organised the timber shipment containing cocaine through his company in Bolivia. He said Shodiya was “simply acting as a pawn, a puppet or a gillie”.

Hopkins said he grew to trust Shodiya as a “conscientious” employee who “followed instructions very well”. He got him to collect a container as it was being delivered in Dublin, which contained cocaine-packed timber.

Hopkins said in evidence that he had Shodiya transport the drugs because he had to drop his daughter at her dance class.

Shodiya described in interview how he helped unload drugs from the container through the night. He was then instructed to drive a trailer with a pallet of the drugs to an industrial estate and later go to Belgard Road in Tallaght with four packages from a plank.

Shodiya was delivering the first batch of cocaine when gardai stopped and arrested him

During trial the Nigeria pleaded not guilty to the charges. He admitted all factual elements of the case, but maintained he hadn’t realised the consignment contained drugs till he got to the yard and that he had just been following Hopkins’s instructions all along.

The court heard Shodiya hadn’t been promised any payment for his role in the operation.

The court also heard that gardai found nothing during a search of Shodiya’s house.

But Judge Hogan, while passing his judgement, said the father-of-four was “no mere callow youth” and knew what he was getting into.

He thus sentenced Shodiya, who has two previous convictions for dangerous driving and failing to remain at accident scene from Drogheda District Court in 2010, a 12-year sentence with two suspended and backdated to when Shodiya entered custody in June 2012.