In Brokedown Palace (1999), Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsale were caught with drugs in their luggage leaving Thailand.
They’d met an Australian man who was a drug smuggler. He offered to treat them to a trip to Hong Kong, planted the drugs, and turned them in to distract from his real drug mules. They were caught while boarding their flight at Don Mueang International Airport (this was before Suvarnabhumi opened) and were interrogated. They signed a confession in Thai, thinking it was their statement professing innocence.
Julia Golovniova is… almost like that, but doesn’t wind up double-crossed by a prosecutor or serving both her own sentence and her friend’s in an ultimate act of self-sacrifice.
Instead, she flew out of Bangkok enroute ultimately to the U.K. and found white pills in her luggage when she arrived that weren’t her own. What if the pills had been found – either on the way out of Thailand, or on arrival back in Britain?
@roaminginsunshine Check your bags, somebody must have put this in my suitcase at the airport between flights! #mumsoftiktok #mumslife #parentsoftiktok #travelingwithkids #traveldiaries #travelfamily #traveltiktok #mumtok #mumsontiktok #fypage #fypp ♬ original sound – roaminginsunshine
In an interview with Newsweek, she described her unsettling find: “I found some white tablets in a clear plastic glove, all in the bottom of one finger of the glove,” buried deep within her dirty clothes. The tablets were unmarked, five in total, and she has “no idea” what they were. “It felt really scary that somehow someone had either accidentally or intentionally put it in my suitcase.”
This began with a flight from Koh Samui to Bangkok on Bangkok Airways. Thai authorities held her bag, and searched it (she had to sign a form… in Thai…). She flew on to Oslo and eventually to London Gatwick, and found the tablets on arrival at home.
In Brokedown Palace, the protagonists face a nightmare of wrongful imprisonment, betrayal, and the realization that justice is elusive in an unfamiliar system. This woman… made it home. But with drugs? And she didn’t get caught? But she did sign a form in Thai that she didn’t understand! And it’s a bit scary that bags out of your control wind up with contents in them that would be assumed to be yours.
This happened in 2013. A couple was getting ready to return to Australia from Thailand when they found drugs inside their luggage. This happened before they got into the airport and they went straight to the Australian embassy.
The embassy called the Thai police and arranged for police protection for the couple for when they landed in Melbourne.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a Shady person at the airport that worked there was responsible for planting the drugs- 5 White pills in the woman’s luggage while she was going through there, that’s why if your gonna get a piece of luggage,then get one that can be double locked i.e. code locking mechanism and at the same time,also add a normal small lock that way it’ll be very hard for any workers at any airport around the world to break into your luggage without wrecking your luggage
Thats why I never check my bags:
https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/world/2023/04/brazilians-who-had-bags-exchanged-for-luggage-with-drugs-leave-prison-in-germany.shtml
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/26195733/couple-jailed-ahmed-malak-cocaine-luggage-turkey-brazil/
If it happened entering Singapore it is a death sentence (some mules are commuted to life but all drug dealing offenses start with death). Just have to be very careful traveling internationally.
After my first trip to Thailand and Malaysia, where I had spent five weeks, on the day after I returned, my apartment in Paris was entirely searched by what I assumed to be burglars: they opened all my bags or suitcases and also the receptacles like glasses cases, packs of cigarettes, cookie tins… disdaining my cd player or my French francs!
Police said that was a new mode of operation : distribute small amounts of drugs in registered suitcases.
That was 40 years ago !
Lesson: don’t leave power banks in your checked luggage. I fly with power banks on every flight. I always have them in my carry-on luggage or jacket. The authorities had every right to search the checked bags without needing any more authority to do it. I wonder what would have happened if she refused to sign the paper in Thai and told them to keep the bag. A lot of times I get held up by Korean security as they suspiciously eye my three clumps of keys. Vehicle and house keys for the USA. Luggage lock keys. House keys for Cambodia. Nothing is ever wrong, they just waste my time and cause packing problems. Only can be weaponized if a sock is handy. At BUF they like using the gas chromatograph on my commercially packaged cheddar cheese. Theater. My belt that has no metal in it is supposed to be delivered today so as to cut out one more crazy command and to not have my pants fall down once again.
Also a mention for the far superior Bangkok Hilton with Nichole Kidman and the amazing Denholm Elliott, great mini-series if you can find it…similar plot, but so well acted.
Ditto Ricardo. No check bags ever (except on ski trips)
Seems strange. Too few pills to use her as an unknowing mule. Enough to get her framed, but she wasn’t. I’m sure there are some marvelous things in those countries. But, I’ve have more than enough new places to visit in my remaining travel years in countries whose legal systems fit my comfort level.
In the movie, the girls *did* knowingly smuggle the drugs. They weren’t tricked, they were a decoy for a larger operation