ATTEMPTS by two drug kingpins to smuggle into Nigeria consignments of heroin through the Port Harcourt International Airport and the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, have been foiled by operatives of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA).
According to a statement signed by its spokesperson, Femi Babafemi, on Sunday, February 9,
one of the kingpins uses dual identities to aid his cross-border movements.
“He has a Nigerian passport with his original name: Onyekwonike Elochuckwu Sylvanus, 30, and that of Sierra Leone with a different name: Kargbo Mohamed Foday,” the statement reads.
The agency said the suspect was intercepted by NDLEA officers with his Sierra Leonean passport on Sunday February 2, 2025 at the Port Harcourt airport, Rivers State during the inward clearance of passengers on a Qatar Airways flight from Doha through Abuja to Port Harcourt.
He was subsequently taken for a body scan which confirmed he ingested illicit drugs and thereafter placed under excretion observation, during which he expelled a total of 62 wraps of heroin in five excretions, weighing 1.348 kilograms.
“Investigation reveals that Sylvanus (alias Kargbo Mohamed Foday) alternates his two identities for different drug trafficking missions between Thailand, Pakistan, Iran, and West African countries.
“He claimed to have gone full time into the illicit drug trade in 2017 when his clothing and shoe business went down,” the NDLEA stated.
The anti-drug agency said the second kingpin, James Herbert Chinoso, 48, was arrested by its operatives at the Lagos Airport on Saturday, February 1 upon his arrival from Madagascar via Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on an Ethiopian Airlines flight.
It added that after a body scan confirmed illicit drug in his system, he was placed under excretion observation, during which he excreted 63 wraps of heroin with a total weight of 909 grams.
According to the NDLEA, Chinoso left Lagos for Madagascar on January 26, 2025, and returned via Addis Ababa after spending a week.
He claimed to have gone into the criminal trade after his phone accessories business in Liberia collapsed.
In another development, two parcels of 2.82 kilograms of Loud, a synthetic strain of cannabis, imported from the United States with Lagos as a destination, were equally intercepted by NDLEA’s Directorate of Operations and General Investigation, DOGI, at a courier firm in Lagos on Thursday, February 6.
In another operation the same day but in a different logistics company in Lagos, anti-narcotics officers intercepted 80 ampoules of pentazocine injection weighing 225 grams concealed in cartons heading to Canada.
In Kano, NDLEA said its operatives on Monday, February 3, arrested the duo of Usaini Salisu and Yahaya Mu’azu, both 23 years old, at Gadar Tamburawa along Zaria Road, where 15,396 pills of tramadol were recovered from a gas cylinder used to conceal the consignment.
The ICIR reported last week that operatives of the NDLEA rescued a 59-year-old businessman, Chijioke Igbokwe, after helping him to undergo emergency surgery to remove 57 of 81 cocaine pellets from his stomach.
The procedure, an exploratory laparotomy, was necessary after Igbokwe struggled for seven days to excrete the illicit substances that he had ingested in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
According to a statement released on Sunday by the NDLEA spokesperson, Babafemi, Igbokwe was arrested on January 26 at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, during the inward clearance of passengers on an Ethiopian Airlines flight.
The statement said an NDLEA body scan confirmed the ingestion of illicit drugs, leading to Igbokwe being placed under excretion monitoring at the agency’s medical facility.
A reporter with the ICIR
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