Operatives of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) have arrested two businessmen, Ihejirika Okechukwu Emmanuel and Iwuagwu Ikedi Victory, alongside a Canada-based nurse, Usman Grace Khadijat Olami, for attempting to import and export illegal drugs at Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Ikeja, Lagos.
Ihejirika, a regular traveler to Thailand, claimed to be importing fish into Nigeria. However, on Tuesday, October 15, 2024, he was apprehended while attempting to board an Ethiopian Airlines flight to Thailand through Addis Ababa.
According to the NDLEA spokesperson, Femi Babafemi, a body scan revealed that the 51-year-old suspect had ingested five large egg-sized wraps of cocaine weighing 400 grams.
He later confessed that he was to be paid after successfully delivering the drugs in Thailand, adding, “I needed the money to boost my fish importation business.”
Similarly, NDLEA officials arrested another suspect, Iwuagwu Ikedi Victory, a 26-year-old businessman, during the inward clearance of passengers from a flight arriving from Brazil on Thursday, October 17.
A body scan showed he had ingested drugs, and under observation, he excreted one pellet of cocaine weighing 22 grams. Victory confessed that he had ingested 30 wraps of cocaine in Brazil but handed over 29 pellets to someone in Addis Ababa. He revealed that he was promised N2.5 million for smuggling the drugs.
In another incident, Usman Grace Khadijat Olami, a Nigerian-Canadian nurse, was arrested on October 4, 2024, while arriving from Toronto, Canada, via Paris. A search of her luggage led to the discovery of 70 parcels of Canadian Loud, a highly potent strain of synthetic cannabis, weighing 35.70 kg. According to NDLEA, during her interrogation, she stated, “I was instructed by my boyfriend to bring the large consignment of Loud into Nigeria.”
Beyond the airport busts, the NDLEA also made significant seizures at the seaports. At the Apapa Seaport in Lagos, NDLEA agents, in collaboration with Customs and other security agencies, intercepted 162,351 bottles of codeine-based syrup from two containers on October 15. In another operation at the Port Harcourt Port Complex in Onne, Rivers State, a container flagged by the agency yielded 7.2 million pills of Tapentadol and Carisoprodol, valued at N3.6 billion.
Additionally, 780 cartons of chlorphenamine, containing 15.6 million opioid pills, were recovered. From two other containers at the same port, the NDLEA confiscated 337,000 bottles of codeine-based syrup valued at N2.35 billion.
These recent seizures bring the total street value of drugs confiscated by the NDLEA at the two seaports to over N7 billion.
