Trucker charged with smuggling cocaine via Blue Water Bridge
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Less than two weeks after a truck driver was sentenced in Sarnia to nearly
17 years in prison
for smuggling cocaine into Canada via the Blue Water Bridge, another trucker has been arrested and accused of the same thing.
Ravinderbir Singh, 23, was taken into custody Wednesday evening or early Thursday morning at the international crossing connecting Michigan and the Sarnia area and charged with importing cocaine and possessing cocaine for the purpose of trafficking, court records show.
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Singh, wearing a black Air Jordan hoodie, appeared briefly in Sarnia bail court Thursday afternoon. He communicated with court staff with the help of a Punjabi interpreter. He was kept in jail and will return to court Wednesday.
A request Thursday for information about the alleged seizure from the Canada Border Services Agency wasn’t immediately returned.
“Due to ongoing investigation, we are not able to provide information at this time,” an RCMP spokesperson said Thursday evening via email.
This is the first known arrest of a truck driver accused of importing drugs at the Blue Water Bridge this year. There were at least three major captures last year. One of them led to the arrest of three additional people, who all were charged with
conspiracy to import cocaine.
There have been 17 known incidents at the Sarnia-area bridge since 2019, all but one involving truck drivers. Just more than a week ago, a Quebec truck driver, caught in 2020 with $23 million in cocaine hidden on his flatbed trailer, was sentenced to just shy of 17 years. A jury found him guilty last fall.
During the past two years in Sarnia,
a Brantford man
driving an SUV and a
Brampton truck driver
each were sentenced to 11 years in prison for smuggling between $3.5 million and $5 million in cocaine. Two Toronto-area tandem truckers were convicted by another Sarnia jury last month of importing $11 million of cocaine and will be sentenced later this year.
The majority of the drug seizures at the Blue Water Bridge in recent years have involved cocaine, although border officers also have found heroin and meth.
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