A nine-year prison sentence imposed by the Paphos criminal court has been increased to 12 years on appeal for a man convicted of importing, possessing, and intending to supply 8.155kg of cannabis, the legal service announced on Tuesday.

The decision follows an appeal lodged by the attorney-general, who argued the original sentence was insufficient and that, among other things, the court did not consider the need for stricter, deterrent penalties for such offences.

The cannabis was found by authorities in a box arriving at Larnaca airport from the United States.

The individual who signed as the recipient was later sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for forgery, after it emerged that he had acted, though unsuspectingly, at the instigation of the “importer” by signing on his behalf.

The “importer,” deemed to have been involved in the entire operation of bringing the drugs into Cyprus with the aim of later channelling them into the domestic market for financial gain, was sentenced by the criminal court to nine years’ concurrent imprisonment for these offences.

“We find that it was wrong not to give any weight to the facts of the commission of the offence, which were particularly aggravating for the respondent, since in his plan to import and trade a large quantity of drugs, he involved third, unsuspecting individuals, and one of them proceeded to commit the offence of forgery, in order to facilitate the commission of the above offences by the respondent,” the appeals court said.