A court in Lahore, Pakistan, has drafted a written verdict that was the key to the release of the twenty-five-year-old Czech model, Tereza Hlůšková. She has already served four years in a Pakistani prison for heroin smuggling, but the court has now decided to set her free. Thanks to the verdict, she is likely to be released from prison on Friday.
“We confirm the execution of the written judgment. Our embassy was informed of the sentence today. Therefore, the procedural act necessary for the subsequent release of the Czech citizen has been completed,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Eva Davidová confirmed the information.
The release form has already been signed by the Pakistani judges and Hlůšková has been found definitely innocent. She can therefore leave the prison in Lahore, where she has spent more than three years. “Her release will follow within hours or days,” Davidová said.
She mentioned that the ministry cannot not specify information about Hlůšková’s exact return due to the wish of her family, which does not want to publish details about her journey from Pakistan back to the Czech Republic.
The release documents reveal that the original verdict was contradicted by the facts and was not supported by any concrete evidence. One of the flaws of the investigation that couldn’t be overlooked was that the police investigator did not send the seized narcotics to the laboratory for examination.
Hlůšková was arrested in January 2018 at a Pakistani airport with nearly nine kilograms of heroin. The documents describe how the woman’s suitcase was opened after a tip-off that a large quantity of drugs would be smuggled through the airport. She was therefore stopped and asked if she was carrying drugs or something similar.
The woman replied that she was not. “Her suitcase was opened but nothing was found in it except for items of general use. However, the weight of the suitcase was abnormal, so the airport officer checked the suitcase by cutting the cloth inside and found a white powder wrapped in a transparent bag. He identified that the powder was heroin, “according to the documents.
From the beginning, the Czech woman claimed that the drugs were planted in her suitcase without her knowledge and that she had gone to Pakistan to work as a model. But the court did not believe her and sent her to prison for eight years and eight months.