MAASTRICHT - Two boys from Beek jokingly played drug runners in Maastricht a few months ago. They drove the car of one of them to Maastricht. There, as a joke, they decided to stop a foreign car to offer drugs to the drivers.
Too bad for the boys that they stopped a police car. That happened just outside Maastricht, on an exit of the A-2. They saw a car with a French license plate approaching and stopped the car. "We know you want to go to a coffee shop. With us you can get anything they sell there," one of the two boys said to the driver. When the latter showed interest, he told them to just follow them with their car. They would take them to a quiet spot in town where they could handle things quickly and safely. "Or maybe you guys are cops?" he had asked further.

The couple drove ahead of the French car toward the city center, but were overtaken a moment later and forced to stop by the driver and passenger of the same car. They turned out to be undercover agents, trying to catch drug runners this way.

To police judges, the boys told them they just wanted to chill out a little. "Just to have some fun. We didn't want to deal drugs at all. We didn't even have them with us. If those people were really following us, we would have made sure we lost them along the way."

Either boy felt miserable afterwards because of what they had done. "I only want to deal with my work. Nothing else, " he said. He had been afraid he would lose his job because of this prank.

The other boy was found to have a serious illness. This prevented him from serving a prison sentence, his lawyer informed. The prosecutor, to her regret, had to admit that they could find legal evidence for the punishability of the two, because they had no drugs on them and did not intend to deal. Therefore, she had to ask for acquittal. "But," she said, "I don't think this is a joke."

The police judge followed her in his sentence. To the sick boy he said, "A prison sentence would have been possible for you too, because there are penitentiary hospitals. So beware."