A 29-year-old South African drug trafficker, Erasmus Jean-Pierre, has been arrested in Nigeria for attempting to export 2.6kg of methamphetamine concealed in his luggage to Middle-East Asia through Nigeria.
This is just as operatives of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency frustrated the moves by a transnational cartel to ship drugs concealed in a pair of male slippers and a wooden drum to Indonesia.
The spokesperson for the NDLEA, Femi Babafemi, disclosed these in a press statement on Sunday.
According to Babafemi, Jean-Pierre’s plan was thwarted by operatives who arrested him and recovered the illicit drug at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja on Wednesday, August 23, 2023, during the outward clearance of passengers on Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 404 from Abuja to the Middle-East via Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
“A thorough search of his luggage led to the discovery of the whitish powdery illicit substance factory packed in different parts of the bag. Preliminary investigation revealed that the suspect arrived in Lagos through Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire on Saturday, August 19, came to Abuja on Tuesday, August 22, and took possession of the brown bag containing the drug consignment on Wednesday, August 23, before heading to the Abuja airport for his flight out of Nigeria,” Babafmi said.
On the transnational drug cartels, the NDLEA spokesman said, “Efforts by transnational drug cartels to move a consignment of 117 grams of ketamine neatly concealed in a pair of leather male slippers being shipped to Indonesia and 2.14kg of skunk clinically hidden in the walls of a local wooden drum were equally frustrated by NDLEA operatives of the Directorate of Operations and General Investigation, DOGI, attached to courier firms in Lagos.”
He added that NDLEA officers in Gombe State while on patrol along Darazo Road on Monday, August 21, recovered an abandoned Volkswagen Sharon with number plate GME 76 XD containing 373,420 pills of opioids including tramadol and diazepam.
In the same vein, he said operatives in Ogun State on Wednesday, August 23, raided the home of a drug dealer, Ifeanyi Orji, in the Ibafo area of the state where 81,000 tablets of tramadol 225mg weighing 32.4kg were recovered.
In Adamawa State, Babafemi said NDLEA operatives on Tuesday, August 22, recovered 60,000 pills of tramadol from a suspect, Ibrahim Abba, 25, who was travelling in a commercial Toyota Starlet car from Kalaa village to Mubi.
In the Federal Capital Territory, he said operatives intercepted two consignments of skunk with a gross weight of 1, 242.1kg.
The first consignment of 665.1kg was seized from a truck around Area 3 on Sunday, August 20, while the second one weighing 577kg was recovered during a stop-and-search operation along Lokoja- Abaji Expressway on the same day.
The consignment was concealed in goods delivery packs inside a container Mercedes truck, whose driver, Yusuf Yakubu-Asokomhe, and his assistant, Tunde Ogundare, were arrested.
