who fled in 2009 during a drug trafficking trial, <\/a>received a seven-year prison sentence for conspiracy to distribute ecstasy on Friday in Seattle.<\/p>\n<\/p>\nU.S. District Court Judge Richard A. Jones sentenced Hardeep Singh, 23, and called the conspiracy a “large-scale operation involving large amounts of drugs that would have an impact on the lives of many in the community,\u201d according to a U.S. Attorney’s Office media release.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Singh was arrested last year in Canada. Kaushal Kainth, 25, of Renton, also failed to appear following a lunch break on the last day of the trial in 2009 and remains wanted by law enforcement.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A jury convicted both men of the crimes four years ago.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
At the time he was indicted, Singh had legal status in the United States. He likely will be deported to his native India following his prison term.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The drug deals involved 285,000 pills valued at more than $2.8 million and occurred in May 2009 at the Southcenter Mall in Tukwila and at a San Jose, Calif., location.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
According to court records and trial testimony, Singh and Kainth agreed over eight days in 2009 to pay a third man to deliver large amounts of ecstasy and benzylpiperazine (BZP) to co-conspirators at the Southcenter Mall and at San Jose.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Ecstasy is an illegal amphetamine-based synthetic drug with euphoric and hallucinatory effects. Benzylpiperazine is an illicit drug that is a stimulant and which also has euphoric effects.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Singh and Kainth did not know the man they offered to pay for the delivery was a confidential government informant working with law-enforcement officials. The informant recorded both men on audio and video. Singh and Kainth gave the confidential informant some 285,000 pills worth more than $2.8 million. The pills were all seized by law enforcement.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement\u2019s (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) investigated the case.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Kent man, who fled in 2009 during a drug trafficking trial, received a seven-year prison sentence for conspiracy to distribute ecstasy on Friday in Seattle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-10740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10740"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10740"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=10740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}