Aidan Jaager
Saskatoon StarPhoenix
Saskatchewan’s highest court has dismissed an appeal from a man who claimed he didn’t know a box he put in the back of his girlfriend’s Land Rover contained as much as $33,000 of cocaine.
Ahmad Ali Rahimi was convicted last May at Saskatoon Court of King’s Bench of possessing cocaine for the purpose of trafficking. He received a sentence of three and a half years.
He was charged after several days of police surveillance back in November 2021.
Court heard Rahimi had $5,000 in his pocket, $355 in his wallet, two cellphones and a box that contained 200 grams of cocaine when he was stopped while driving his girlfriend’s Land Rover.
Police said the cocaine was split up into one and five-ounce packages with empty plastic packaging and buffing agent.
During his trial, Rahimi testified he was helping his girlfriend, Jessica Litman, prepare for a trip to Calgary, and didn’t know what was inside the box she gave him to put in her vehicle.
He said he offered to put gas in her vehicle and run other errands before returning the Land Rover to Litman for her road trip.
Rahimi said Litman was “his boss and described their romantic relationship as on and off again,” the appeal decision stated.
“There’s no logical reason why the owner of the cocaine would risk exposure or theft of such valuable cargo by sending it along on errands unrelated to the contents of the box,” Justice Colin Clackson ruled in his trial decision.
Rahimi appealed his conviction, arguing that Clackson erred by inferring the drugs were his based on who was in control of the vehicle.
Chief Justice Robert Leurer, along with Justices Meghan McCreary and Naheed Bardai, rejected all arguments in a written decision released last month.
“In short, the judge’s reasons show that he considered the value and quantity of the cocaine in the box as one of the reasons for finding that Mr. Rahimi was aware of the box’s contents,” Leurer wrote.
“Thus, there is no foundation for Mr. Rahimi’s argument that the judge erred in law by treating the presence of the drugs in the vehicle he controlled as conclusive proof of his knowledge of their presence.”
A police officer who testified at the trial said the packaging of the drugs aligned with someone who was an upper-level dealer.
The officer added that “when selling in larger weights, the cash held by the dealer is typically in large denominations because of the price of cocaine sold in such weights.”
“The sale of cocaine at the street level typically involves smaller quantities of cocaine and therefore the dollar denominations involved in the transaction are smaller as well,” the appeal decision summarized.
The $5,000 in large denominations in Rahimi’s pocket, along with the $355 in smaller denominations in his wallet, aligns with Rahimi’s high-level status, the decision noted.
The appeal judges agreed with Clackson that Rahimi’s claim of being a “blind courier” was implausible, ruling it’s unlikely that Litman would trust him with valuable drugs without telling him, given their unstable relationship.
Rahimi was ordered to surrender himself to police. He had been out on interim judicial release pending the appeal decision.
– with StarPhoenix files
