Trial date set for drug-smuggling suspects
By Shurtz, Delon on June 24, 2020.
Delon Shurtz
lethbridge herald
A trial has finally been scheduled for a husband and wife accused of trying to smuggle drugs into Canada at the Coutts border in 2017.
The hearing was scheduled to run last April in Lethbridge Court of Queen’s Bench, but it was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The matter was back in court Monday where a new trial was set for April 19-30, 2021, nearly four and a half years after Gurminder and Kirandeep Toor were charged.
A man and woman hauling a commercial load of produce from California to Alberta were stopped at the Coutts border Dec. 2, 2017.
Border officers searched the cab of the truck and found 84 bricks of cocaine weighing 99 kilograms, considered the largest cocaine seizure recorded by the Canada Border Services Agency in Alberta’s history.
RCMP reported the drugs were worth between $6.5 million and $8 million on the street depending on how they’re broken down for sale. A media spokesperson for the CBSA said the drugs would provide on the street between 100,000 and 200,000 hits.
The shipment was destined for the Calgary area, RCMP reported at the time, but the drugs likely would have been shipped to other provinces once they were processed.
Gurminder and Kirandeep Toor are each charged with drug smuggling and drug possession for the purpose of trafficking.
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13-12
what if, rather than arrest the drivers of such a large cache, the plan instead would be to pretend to not have discovered anything, bu then follow the vehicle and keep a 24 hour watch to see where the trail led? might that have uncovered the larger operation? might that have determined just how complicit the two in the truck were?