PETALING JAYA: A mother and her daughter from Malaysia spent four months in an Australian jail for importing 25kg of brown ginger tea that police thought was drugs.
The two are now suing the Australian authorities for damages.
Connie Chong Vun Pui and her daughter Melanie Lim San Yan brought in the tea, which is popular as a remedy for period pain in Malaysia, to sell at a marked-up rate in Sydney.
According to the magazine Vice, if it all went according to plan, they would have made a small profit of A$90 (RM270) while providing the service.
Instead, it all went wrong when their home in south-west Sydney was raided by heavily armed police in January.
The raid followed the seizure of the tea shipment at the Sydney international airport by Australian Border Force (ABF) officials who wrongly identified the contents as amphetamine.
Vice said the duo were jailed without bail despite authorities being made aware of issues with the tests used to identify the substance in the following weeks and months.
The charges were not withdrawn until Aug 10 when New South Wales police received their own forensic analysis.
According to Vice, a Sydney court heard that the ABF had used a presumptive “hazmat” test to identify the imported product as Phenmetrazine, an illegal stimulant commonly used for recreational purposes.
However, the court also heard that the presumptive test merely generated a spectrum of similar substances to Phenmetrazine – and that the illicit drug was the fourth most likely behind sugar, sucrose and powdered sugar.
Following this, a federal police forensic analyst wrote to the leading officer on the case, Tara Conaghan, to express concern over the test.
“Mate, in a nutshell, we cannot take from this ABF result that the sample contains or does not contain Phenmetrazine,” the analyst wrote to Conaghan.
The court heard that Conaghan failed to pass this information on to the women’s defence team.
When cross-examining Conaghan, Chong’s lawyer Steve Boland asked her why she didn’t disclose this new information to the women sooner, to which she replied: “Because the drugs were still waiting to be completely tested.”
“So, what, they’ve got to sit it out in jail?” Boland asked, and was met with silence, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. “I’ll assume that question is not going to be answered,” he added.
Chong and Lim were not bailed until May and are now suing for costs, which the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions has refused to pay.
The case has been adjourned to March.
