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LATEST NEWS
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Rachel Who? The Aussie teenager lost in Hong Kong
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Thursday Jun 14 - By Mark Burrows - National Nine News
Rachel Diaz as a schoolgirl |
Funny thing, the media — when it comes to drug smugglers, we can be fickle.
Take Schapelle Corby, sweating it out in a Bali prison with hot and cold running rats.
Television and newspapers can't get enough and those green eyes have sold a million magazines, not to mention her best-selling diary.
She's been convicted and acquitted a thousand times at dinner parties across Australia: Hollywood's got Paris but they haven't got our girl with the funny name — Schapelle, our home-grown pin-up in pinstripes.
But here's where it gets strange.
In a Hong Kong jail there's another Australian woman doing time for drugs.
Her name is Rachel Diaz and it's a fair bet you haven't got a clue who she is, let alone what she looks like…
It was April 2005 and Rachel rang her mother in the Sydney suburb of East Hills to say she was sleeping over at a friend's house.
She was sleeping over alright, but in Hong Kong: Rachel the trainee hairdresser was about to become a heroin smuggler.
She was 17.
What Rachel didn't know was that Australian police were on to her, and the moment she arrived in Hong Kong she was being followed by local narcotics police.
When they burst into a nondescript Kowloon hotel room, there was Rachel and another would-be Australian mule, 15-year-old Chris Vo — and 114 small packages of heroin.
They were condoms filled with nearly a kilogram of heroin, worth about a million dollars to a dealer in Cabramatta.
For every condom she swallowed, Rachel stood to make $200.
At her a trial she pleaded guilty but there was evidence she'd got cold feet and wasn't going to swallow the packages.
But that didn't matter to the judge: she was sentenced to 10 years eight months and Vo was jailed for nine years.
For the last year Rachel has been growing up in a cell with 12 other women in Tai Tam jail.
From the outside the prison doesn't look that bad — it's perched on a hillside overlooking the entrance to Hong Kong harbour and is ominously surrounded by cemeteries and a towering crematorium.
But in letters to Kay Danes, an advocate with the Foreign Prisoner Support Service (FPSS), it's clear Rachel is doing it tough.
"I don't know how much longer I can take being in here," she wrote last February. "But I have to be strong for my family."
Her family consists of her parents, Ferdie and Maria, and two younger brothers.
Somehow Ferdie has scratched together the money for an air ticket so he can attend everyone of Rachel's court appearances.
He can't afford a hotel but is looked after by parishioners at the local Catholic church, who find him a room.
This week marked one of Rachel's most important court appearances: in Hong Kong's High Court, her lawyers called for her prison term to be cut.
In his first-ever interview, Ferdie Diaz told National Nine News: "I believes she deserves a reduced sentence because she has fully co-operated with the Australian Federal Police (AFP)."
The judge will announce his decision in coming weeks and National Nine News understands Rachel could be line for a substantial reduction in her sentence because of her continued co-operation with the AFP and the NSW South East Asian Crime Squad.
That goodwill hasn't stopped the FPSS condemning the tip off that led to her arrest overseas.
Spokesman Martin Hodgson told National Nine News "she should have been detained at Sydney Airport by police, it should have never come to this… to subject a minor to those conditions in Hong Kong is unnecessary."
There's another reality, however — the tip-off could have saved her life.
If the condoms had broken open mid-flight, Rachel could have easily died.
But her father has moved on: he wants his daughter home, whether she's free or if she has to serve out her time in an Australian jail, and that's now a real possibility under the foreign prisoner transfer scheme.
The story of Rachel Diaz lacks the soap opera of the Corbys: Hong Kong's strict press laws ensure there are none of emotional pictures of the harassed prisoner being manhandled in and out of court, but even without the images her story is compelling.
She's a girl barely out of school who fell in with the wrong crowd and who now wants to start again.
Two years have passed since the arrest and Ferdie says she has changed.
"Now she realises that her best friend is her family," he says.
Rachel says as much in letters to the FPSS: "I love my family and I'm sorry for all the hurt I've put them through," she writes. "I want to be the best daughter I can possibly be to make up for everything."
You're unlikely to hear Rachel's name spoken at dinner party drug debates and there will be no tell-all diaries — and that's just the way Ferdie Diaz wants it.
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