A US mother of seven suspected of drug smuggling after marijuana was allegedly found under her bus seat in Mexico was freed Thursday after the case was dropped for lack of evidence.
Yanira Maldonado told reporters she was delighted to be released.
When the authorities told her Thursday night she was to be freed, Maldonado said with a broad smile, “I screamed!”
“They are so happy that I’m out. They can’t wait to see me,” Maldonado said of her family in a televised news conference.
Maldonado, 42, had proclaimed her innocence since she was detained last week in a military checkpoint in the northwestern state of Sonora as she was returning home to Arizona with her husband.
The soldiers detained her after saying they had found almost six kilograms (12 pounds) of marijuana under her seat.
She was freed after court officials reviewed security video showing her and her husband Gary boarding the bus. Between them they were carrying a purse, two bottles of water and blankets but nothing bulky like a load of marijuana, Maldonado lawyer Jose Francisco Benitez Paz told ABC News.
Her release was also carried by CNN and other news outlets.
Maldonado has given tearful interviews to US television networks, saying she was a devout Mormon who had gone to the state of Sonora in northwest Mexico for an aunt’s funeral.
“This is a nightmare, I need to be out,” she told KNXV-TV of Phoenix, Arizona, in an interview Wednesday from the detention center in the border city of Nogales. “I’m going to be free. I’m not guilty, I’ve got nothing to hide.”
She told CNN that she has been reading the Book of Mormon, praying and fasting.
“I’m innocent and I’m a good mom, I love the gospel,” she said.
US mother of seven freed in Mexico after drug seizure
