Operatives of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) have arrested two businessmen, Ihejirika Okechukwu Emmanuel and Iwuagwu Ikedi Victory as well as a Canada-based nurse, Usman Grace Khadijat Olami at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, MMIA Ikeja Lagos for attempting to import and export cocaine pellets and parcels of Loud, a synthetic strain of cannabis through the airport.
Ihejirika, who frequents Thailand from where he claims to be importing fish into Nigeria was arrested on Tuesday, October 15, 2024 while attempting to board an Ethiopian Airlines flight to Thailand via Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
According to NDLEA spokesperson Femi Babafemi, when he was brought for a body scan, the results revealed that he had swallowed an illegal narcotic, which turned out to be cocaine.
“As a result, he was placed under excretion surveillance, during which he ejected five large egg-sized cocaine wraps weighing 400 pounds. In his statement, the 51-year-old suspect admitted that he would be compensated if the heroin consignment was successfully delivered in Thailand. “He stated that he needed the funds to expand his fish importation business,” according to the NDLEA statement.
In the same vein, NDLEA operatives at the Lagos airport on Thursday, October 17, intercepted a 26-year-old businessman Iwuagwu Ikedi Victory coming from Brazil via Addis Ababa during the inward clearance of passengers on Ethiopian Airlines flight after his body scan revealed ingestion of illicit drug.
When he was put under observation, he excreted a pellet of cocaine weighing 22 grams.
He however confessed to the NDLEA that he ingested 30 wraps of the illicit drug in Brazil but excreted 29 pellets in Addis Ababa, where he handed them over to another person. The suspect revealed that he was to be paid N2.5 million for trafficking the drug.
The NDLEA further explained that a Nigerian Canadian nurse, Olami was on October 4, arrested by NDLEA officers at the Lagos airport during the inward clearance of Air France passengers from Toronto, Canada via Paris.
During a search of her luggage, a total of 70 parcels of Canadian Loud, weighing 35.70kg were recovered from her. During her interview, she claimed she was in Nigeria to meet her boyfriend who instructed her to come with the large consignment of the highly sought-after synthetic cannabis,” the NDLEA stated.
Meanwhile, at the seaports, a total of 162,351 bottles of codeine based syrup were intercepted from two containers at the Apapa seaport in Lagos by NDLEA operatives during a joint examination of two containers with men of the Customs Service and other security agencies on Tuesday October 15; even as not less than 7,200,000 pills of Royal 225mg Tapentadol and Carisoprodol worth N3,600,000,000 in street value were seized from a watch-listed container from India at Port Harcourt Port Complex, Onne, Rivers State on Tuesday October 15.
The NDLEA said in the same container, 780 cartons of chlorphenamine containing 15,600,000 pills of the opioid, were also recovered. From two other watch-listed containers equally searched at the port in Onne, a total of 337,000 bottles of codeine-based syrup worth N2,359,000,000 were recovered from them on Tuesday 15th and Thursday 17th October. This brings the total value of the seized Tapentadol, Carisoprodol and Codeine consignments at the two seaports to N7,095,457,000.
