Former ‘EastEnders’ Star Faces Life Behind Bars Over Shocking Meth Smuggling Plot

Soap fans built their early 2010s viewing habits around the gritty world of ‘EastEnders’, and its digital spinoff gave several young actors their first real shot at the spotlight. Walford has always had a flair for drama, but few could have predicted that one of its alumni would end up at the center of a real international crime story.

The performer in question, Emaa Hussen, built a modest but visible career through the late 2000s and 2010s. She played the character Naz in ‘E20’, the BBC iPlayer web spinoff of ‘EastEnders’ that launched in 2010 and followed young residents of Walford. She also appeared alongside Jason Statham in the 2013 thriller ‘Hummingbird’, released in the United States as ‘Redemption’.

Now, that same actress is facing the possibility of life in prison. Hussen, 34, has been charged in Australia with attempting to smuggle 320 kilograms of methamphetamine into the country from Ghana, with an estimated street value of A$296 million, or roughly US$208 million. She appeared before a court in Sydney on Thursday, charged with attempting to import a commercial quantity of methamphetamine, an offense that carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment under Australian law.

The details of how the operation allegedly unfolded read like something out of a crime drama. According to BBC, investigators say the case began in April, when Australian Border Force officers detected anomalies in two shipping containers that had arrived at Sydney’s Port Botany. X-ray scans reportedly revealed a white crystalline substance hidden among bags of charcoal, which was later confirmed to be methamphetamine.

Police allege the operation didn’t stop at the docks. Authorities claim the drugs were removed from the shipment before it reached a storage facility in western Sydney, where Hussen allegedly oversaw the unloading of the container. Investigators say several bags were then moved to a property in Blacktown, where Hussen was ultimately arrested, with officers seizing electronic devices and a notebook from the scene.

Hussen is not facing these allegations alone. Two other people, a 30 year old woman and a 32 year old man from Adelaide, have also been charged after allegedly using false identities to rent the Sydney storage units where the shipment was delivered. The court denied Hussen bail at an earlier hearing, and she is due to return to face the charges in August.

The case has already drawn attention well beyond Australia, given the unlikely intersection of British soap opera nostalgia and a high stakes international drug trafficking case. Whatever the outcome, the scale of the alleged operation, with a haul valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, has turned a relatively obscure former ‘EastEnders’ face into the center of one of the year’s strangest celebrity crime headlines.

What do you think really led a former soap actress down this path, and should her past fame change how this case is covered?