We interrupt your Eagles’ postseason elation for some real news: Flyers forward Jori Lehterä has been formally charged for his alleged connection to one of the all-time largest cocaine rings in Finland’s Tampere region.

While plenty of Flyers fans questioned how the team could have stood behind Lehterä in September when the original story broke – even allowing him to travel with the team and play at different periods of the season – they might have gotten the clarification they’ve been waiting for. The official charge against Lehterä wasn’t for being a drug kingpin or the Finnish Pablo Escobar. Per Tuomas Rimpiläinen of Aamulehti:

According to a preliminary investigation, Lehterä obtained eight grams of cocaine between early June and late July of 2018 in Tampere. According to the prosecutors he also tried to obtain one gram of cocaine in May of 2018.

Per the report, Finnish officials were in the midst of a wiretapping operation on three suspects, two of whom had phones in contact with Lehterä. Further along in the investigation, those two phones were pinpointed near Lehterä’s Lake Näsijärvi cottage.

Finnish law would typically treat a first offense like this with a fine, and while the maximum prison sentence could be up to two years, it appears the prosecutors are pushing for a five-month short suspended sentence.

Below is a video from the courtroom. One of the poor guys buried his face into his mittens, after the jump:

Update: Official statement here from Jori Lehterä via the Flyers:

“As I have maintained from the outset, these charges against me are false and I will clear my name. I will have no further comment on the matter until that time.”

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