A Canadian in jail in China on drug charges has now been sentenced to death.

Already in jail on drug trafficking charges, 36-year-old Robert Schellenberg was retried this week and had is original 15 year sentenced increased to the death penalty.

In this image taken from a video footage run by China’s CCTV, Canadian Robert Lloyd Schellenberg attends his retrial at the Dalian Intermediate People’s Court in Dalian, northeastern China’s Liaoning province on Monday, Jan. 14, 2019 (CCTV via Associated Press)

Arrested in 2014, he was found guilty in 2018 and sentenced to the 15 year term. The case went largely unnoticed until the Chinese decided to retry Schellenberg bringing in a new witness and inviting international media to attend. The new witness claimed he helped Schellenberg pack 200 kilogrammes of drugs into car tires to be shipped to Australia.

The state prosecutors argued the original charge was too lenient and upped the charge from drug trafficking to that of organised international drug trafficking.

Latest move in escalating tension

The fact the international press was invited, and that a case that originally took four years, reached a new verdict in a matter of several hours, is widely viewed as being highly unusual.

Analysts also generally suggest that this is another case of Chinese putting additional pressure on Canada over the arrest of Meng Wanzhou. The top Huawei telecom official was arrested during a flight stopover in Vancouver at the request of American officials who are seeking her extradition to the U.S. on charges of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran.

China’s ambassador to Canada, Lu Shaye, wrote a stinging editorial in the Hill Times news accusing Canada and western nations of racism. (Justin Tang-CP)

China retaliated by arresting two Canadians in China on charges of threatening Chinese security.

Canadian pressure to release those two men, led to China’s ambassador to Canada lashing out against “western egotism and white supremacy” in judging his country.  The angry response came in an opinion article to the Ottawa-based Hill Times news.

Commenting this morning on the case, Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau said, “It is of extreme concern to us as a government, as it should be to all our international friends and allies, that China has chosen to begin to arbitrarily apply [the] death penalty… as in this case,” ( CBC News)

A former oil worker, Schellenberg has claimed he was framed. He has ten days to appeal this latest sentence.