British Girls Guilty of Ghana Drug Smuggling

Two British teenage girls accused to trying to smuggle 6kg of cocaine out of Ghana in laptop bags were today found guilty of drug smuggling.

Yasemin Vatansever and Yatunde Diya, both 16 and from north London, face up to three years in prison.

Following the juvenile court session, held behind closed doors, officials said sentencing had been deferred until December 5, ahead of a report being compiled by Ghanaian social services in association with British authorities.

After the verdict, the girls were bundled into a waiting vehicle, their heads covered by green patterned scarves.

They were arrested on July 2 at Accra's Kotoka airport after narcotics officers found cocaine worth an estimated £300,000 sewn into the lining of laptop bags they were carrying.

Their families have insisted throughout that they knew nothing about the drugs and had been set up by traffickers.

In a statement read outside the court by Sabine Zanker, of the group Fair Trials International, the families were "deeply disturbed with the verdict delivered this morning".

"Yasemin and Yatunde are two extremely vulnerable young girls whose naivety was ruthlessly exploited by the men who lured them to Ghana and led them to this terrible fate," the statement said.

Despite leaks from prosecutors claiming the girls both knew what they were carrying, the families insisted neither had any knowledge about the drugs.

"Our daughters are not the criminal masterminds which the prosecuting authorities attempted to portray them as," the statement said.

The teenagers were tried under Ghana's progressive Juvenile Justice Act, meaning that their trial had to be completed within six months. They can only be held on remand for three months.

According to Mark Ewuntomah, the deputy head of Ghana's narcotics control board, the girls arrived in the country on June 26 and spent a week based at a hotel in the capital.

He said they told him their trip had been arranged by a north London man who had promised them an all-expenses-paid holiday and £3,000 apiece if they each brought a package back to the UK.

Two young Ghanaian men who met the girls on their arrival in Accra allegedly gave them two empty laptop bags and dropped them off at the airport on July 2.

Last month, Vatansever told Channel 4 News from prison: "There were basically two boys over here who gave us two bags. We never thought anything bad was inside ... and they told us to go to the UK and drop it off to some boy at the airport.

"It was basically like a set-up. They didn't tell us nothing, we didn't think nothing, because basically we are innocent. We don't know nothing about this drugs and stuff, we don't know nothing."

In recent years Ghana has become a key transit point for South American drug barons seeking to ship cocaine to Europe.

In 2005 and 2006, customs officials at Heathrow and Gatwick airports intercepted 400kg of cocaine from Ghana - more than from Nigeria, the traditional hub of drug smuggling in west Africa.