Liberia has shown drug cartels that handing a government official in West Africa a bag of money does not always guarantee an easy transit point for cocaine to Europe and the US, a drug expert said.
Instead they used this scenario to stage what the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) terms its most complex and lengthy undercover operation in Africa.
And in so doing they smashed a plot to transit over US$100 million of cocaine through Liberia: a plot which, according to court documents, implicated the Colombians rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC).
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf declared in a statement “Liberia is officially closed for business to the narcotics trade” and the west African nation drew kudos at home and abroad for its role in Operation Relentless.
TWO-YEAR STING
The two-year sting led to the arrest of eight people this week and involved the President’s son as an undercover mole.
Russell Benson, DEA regional director for Europe and Africa, said on Wednesday that Liberia had proved the often troubled region was not necessarily an easy target.
“Instead of accepting a bag full of money, they decided we are going to fight them and decided to enforce the rule of law,” he said.
Liberia approached the DEA in 2007 when drug traffickers tried to bribe high-level officials, including the president’s son Fumbah Sirleaf, who heads the country’s national security agency.
“We have seen very significant drug traffickers try to corrupt officials at the highest level to gain what they need to gain, access to a private airport to fly in private planes laden with cocaine, or a sea point,” Benson said. “They have been able to successfully do it before. In this case we utilized that scenario and used it against them.”
In the past decade, cocaine has increasingly been trafficked from Colombia and Venezuela through West African countries such as Guinea-Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Sierra Leone, Togo, Mali, Ghana, Nigeria and Liberia.
“Several of these countries have undergone very dramatic issues and problems as a result of this cocaine trafficking ... there isn’t one country on that west coast that hasn’t been touched in a very negative way,” Benson said.
Liberian Information Minister Norris Tweh said the government was “proud of the job well done” by Fumbah Sirleaf.
The suspects include a host of prolific drug traffickers including a Russian pilot, a Nigerian who has served long sentences in the US for heroin trafficking, and a Ghanaian with extensive knowledge of maritime navigation.
GOING TO AMERICA
Five defendants have already been transferred to the US to be charged; two are on their way and one, arrested in Spain, remains in custody there.
This is the first time in 30 years Liberia has transferred suspects to the US on drug-related charges, the DEA said in a statement.
According to the indictment, the charges involve planned shipments of cocaine — one at 4,000kg with a retail value of US$100 million, and two more that totaled 2,000kg, it said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion