The long-running saga of a Polish captain imprisoned in Mexico on drug-smuggling charges shows no sign of ending as the coronavirus crisis has delayed court proceedings.
The plight of Andrzej Lasota garnered widespread attention in January after a petition calling for his release attracted nearly 10,000 signatures.
Lasota was scheduled to have his case heard this week, given a deadline for prosecutors to drop or press charges. But the closure of courts in Mexico due to the pandemic has pushed back the hearing to late May and June.
The plight of Andrzej Lasota garnered widespread attention in January after a petition calling for his release attracted nearly 10,000 signatures.
Lasota was scheduled to have his case heard this week, given a deadline for prosecutors to press charges or drop the case. But the closure of courts in Mexico due to the pandemic has pushed back the hearing to late May and June.
Health concerns
The delays come amid growing concerns over the health of the 62-year-old captain.
Lasota has lost 60 kg since his incarceration last August and transfer to a high-security prison.
He is allowed to receive visits every eight days in Tepic jail, which is notorious for housing drug-cartel members.
“Tepic is one of the most heavily secured prisons in Mexico,” said Piotr Rusinek, fleet superintendent of Cyprus-based shipmanagement company Intership Navigation.
“It has 10,000 prisoners and 99% of them are ex-cartel members. The one man that is not is Captain Lasota.”
Lasota was commanding the Cyprus-registered, 32,000-dwt multipurpose vessel UBC Savannah (built 2000) when it was detained on 5 August last year after 240 kg of cocaine was found in one of the holds during a port call at Altamira, eastern Mexico.
Intership has been seeking to have the charges dropped, claiming that Lasota’s adherence to proper procedures may have contributed to his plight.
The courts were to have decided by 3 April whether Lasota could be released, after his lawyers argued that he had been improperly held for more than 72 hours on his initial arrest.
But delays caused by coronavirus have pushed that back. Proceedings should now take place between 27 May and 11 June.
Lasota’s plight has highlighted the risk facing seafarers as drug smugglers increasingly seek to use ships to transport illicit cargoes.
Lasota was arrested while the UBC Savannah was unloading cargoes that had been taken on at Barranquilla, Colombia.
He immediately suspended discharging after drugs were spotted buried under several thousand tonnes of petcoke coal and reported the findings to the Mexican authorities. But the authorities arrested the vessel and its crew members, who were imprisoned in Ciudad Victoria. The crew were released by the court two months later and deported six weeks after that.
The UBC Savannah is one of three ships detained in Mexico under similar circumstances.
‘It's nonsense’
The other two are the 38,000-dwt UBC Tokyo (built 2005), arrested in Altamira last September with 50 kg of cocaine, and the 54,042-dwt Delphi Ranger (built 2009), which is managed by Greece’s Enterprise Shipping & Trading.
“The three vessels are still arrested there and nobody knows on which grounds,” Rusinek said. “They [are] not talking about the smuggling of the narcotics — they’re taking about negligence of duties. It’s nonsense.”
Efforts to free Lasota culminated in a petition last year addressed to the Polish president, Andrzej Duda.
It highlighted allegations that the captain was detained without due cause or trial and referred to “innocent seamen, going about their daily business, being treated as common criminals”.
But Rusinek said the letter received “zero answer” from Duda.
A Mexican judge set a five-month deadline for the prosecutor’s office to gather evidence to start the trial proceedings, which may take up to two years.
If found guilty, the captain faces prolonged imprisonment, ranging from 10 to 20 years.
The campaign to free Lasota has the support of shipmanagers’ association InterManager, although a spokesperson said the Covid-19 outbreak means his plight has been put on the back burner.
