A 55-year-old man from Hollandschevel has been sentenced to fifteen months in prison for making a log cabin available on his property and helping to build a drug lab in that cabin. The punishment is equal to the requirement of the Public Prosecution Service (OM).
The man strongly denied in court fourteen days ago that he had anything to do with the lab that was rounded up in September 2020. He was totally surprised by that, he said. Two men from Kiel-Windeweer (69) and Winschoten (53) were busy installing electricity. They did this on behalf of the farmer, they told the police at the time.
A drug dog hit several places in the yard. The judge concludes from this that hard drugs had already been produced before. In the log cabin and in a horse trailer, the agents found equipment and raw materials needed to produce synthetic drugs. The police were already aware that something was going on with a drug lab in the yard on Barsweg.
In another study of a drug lab, this information emerged via encrypted chat conversations. This referred to a lab that was under construction in Hollandscheveld. In those conversations, a person called himself Noisy Star. That person set the rules about the behaviors in his yard, where that lab was built. It cannot be otherwise than that this was the 55-year-old resident, the judge finds.
In the chat, the farmer was also described by others. Those descriptions match the person and circumstances of the Hollandschevelder. The judge therefore believes nothing that the man knew nothing and did not know the two workers on his property. The alternative scenarios, which the defense came up with, pushed the judge aside.
Synthetic drugs are very harmful to public health and, above all, addictive. A drug lab often attracts other crime. And the chemical waste is dumped in nature without thinking, with major harmful consequences. Corrosive fumes are released during production, which are harmful to people in the vicinity.
“And then we are not even talking about the fire and explosion hazard,” said the judge. The Hollandschevelder didn’t think about that. He only cared about the money he earned. Bad, said the judge. A longer prison sentence would have been more appropriate. The judge took the passage of time into account in favor of the fifty-year-old.