Dutch woman, cleared of drug smuggling, tells court of racial profiling by airport police

A Dutch woman of Dominican extraction, who is fighting a constitutional case against the Commissioner of Police claiming to have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and degrading treatment, has told a court how she would be subjected to drug searches at the airport every time she arrived in Malta.

The woman, Jennifer Koster, told the court that she had been in a relationship with a Maltese man for three years and would visit the island regularly. The searches would never turn up anything, she said.

Koster is claiming to have been subjected to arbitrary arrest, disproportionate use of force, inhuman and degrading treatment by the police after she was made to spend a total of 16 hours under arrest, during which she was subjected to intimate searches and made to search through her own faeces. 

Koster said that she had asked why she was being searched. The initial reason she had been given was that the searches were “routine control,” but claimed that police had later told her that the fact that she is Dominican and was arriving from Holland was a factor.

Asked by one of her lawyers, Angie Muscat, whether similar searches had ever happened anywhere else on her travels, she said it would only happen when she visited Malta. “I go to Germany, Spain, everywhere, with no problem.”

Medical doctor Joseph Farrugia Agius, a renal consultant at Mater Dei hospital, testified that he had felt that an initial report by a radiologist on a Dutch woman suspected of “body packing” – smuggling drugs by concealing them in bodily orifices – was misleading.

Farrugia Agius testified that he was the medical consultant on call that day. He said that the initial X-ray report from the Emergency department, indicating the possibility of a foreign object being present had, in his opinion, been made to pass the buck on to someone else because this was a police case.

“He [the emergency doctor] didn’t want to say ‘she’s clean’ or ‘there is definitely something’.” As a shadow was reported on the X-ray of her vagina, Koster was then referred to the duty gynecologist, who after examining her concluded that there were no foreign bodies in the vagina. A consultant radiologist was also shown the X-rays and had also reached the same conclusion, said Farrugia Agius.

Koster herself had also testified as to the events of the 18 February. She recalled that she had just arrived on the flight from Eindhoven and had decided to go straight from the airport to a Chinese restaurant, on the suggestion of her Maltese boyfriend, as she hadn’t eaten much on the late night flight.

Whilst he was driving to the restaurant, she said, three cars came out of nowhere and blocked their vehicle’s passage. She said that at least five men swarmed out and surrounded them, banging on their car. So aggressive were the plainclothes police officers - who at that point had not yet identified themselves - that her terrified boyfriend drove on, thinking it to be a robbery attempt.

However they were forced to stop further down the road, at which point the police identified themselves and dragged the woman and her boyfriend from the car. She said she was only told she was under arrest whilst she was being driven to the hospital for examination.

Koster recalled how she then had to undergo a vaginal examination performed by a male doctor, while two female police officers, a nurse and another doctor looked on. “I had to open my legs with everybody watching me. How do you think I felt? I didn’t have anything. They had taken the X-rays. They were supposed to know that I had nothing in my body,” she said.

She was administered a laxative and made to search her own excrement, covering her hands with a plastic bag as no gloves were available. No drugs were found and she was eventually released without charge after spending sixteen hours in custody.

Lawyers Franco Debono, Angie Muscat and Marion Camilleri are appearing for Koster.