The Gambia’s Drug Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEAG, said on Friday it has seized more than two tons of cocaine at the country’s seaport.
The drugs are said to have been shipped from Ecuador’s port of Guayaquil and arrived in The Gambia via Spain’s Algeciras port on December 27, 2020.
One hundred and eighteen (118) bags of cocaine weighing 2 tons, 952 kilograms and 852grams were seized from four containers of industrial salt after a search on January 7, the country’s anti-narcotic agency said in a statement.
Officers in Banjul said this is so far the biggest bust in the history of cocaine seizures in The Gambia, with a street value of an estimated 4.5 billion Dalasi (more than $87.3 million).
A Gambian has been arrested in connection with the bust, and law enforcement agents are on the hunt for another man, a French-passport holder resident in Fajara, a few kilometres outside Gambia’s capital, in whose name the salt consignment was shipped.
It is not clear where the cocaine shipment was ultimately headed, but drug enforcement agents believe the shipment may be a case of rip-on and rip-off strategy used by drug traffickers.
The rip-on/rip-off technique is used by South American drug traffickers to hide illegal drugs in a legitimate shipment with the aim of offloading the drugs in one of the stop-offs of the shipment before it reaches its final destination.
Sometimes, the traffickers just do not have the opportunity to recover the drugs for their intended destination (mainly Europe) and it ends up in the wrong destination like The Gambia, according to an officer of the drug agency.
“This seizure is yet another confirmation that The Gambia, like other West African States, continue to be a storage and transit route for cocaine by international organized criminal groups,” Ousman Saidybah, a spokesman for the Drug Law Enforcement Agency said in a statement.
“Certainly, these drugs are not destined for The Gambia, thus not for local consumption,” he said.
The West African sub-region is known to be a major transit hub for trafficking drugs from South American countries, usually intended for consumption in Europe.
In 2010, Gambian authorities made a similar bust with the discovery of 2.34 tons of cocaine worth an estimated one billion US Dollars at an underground warehouse in Bonto village, 45 kilometers outside the capital, Banjul.
A dozen suspects of Venezuelan, Netherlands, Nigerian, and Mexican nationalities were put on trial for this bust, with eight of them handed jail terms in 2011.
