. Brazil returnee excretes 60 wraps of cocaine
The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) has declared Miss Commonwealth Nigeria Culture 2015/2016, Ms Oluwadamilola Aderinoye, wanted for allegedly dealing in illicit drugs.
Director, Media and Advocacy, NDLEA, Femi Babafemi in a statement, yesterday, said Ms Aderinoye, who is the founder of Queen Christmas Foundation, a non-governmental organisation, escaped from her Lekki, Lagos residence as operatives of the agency were closing in on her.
Babafemi said NDLEA operatives raided her apartment at Oral Estate, Lekki on January 24, following credible intelligence that she was dealing in illicit substances.
“Recovered from her home during the search witnessed by the estate officials were 606gm of Canadian Loud, a synthetic strain of Indian hemp. Also recovered from her residence was an electronic weighing scale, large quantities of drugs packing plastics, a black RAV 4 SUV and her photographs,’’ Babafemi stated.
Meanwhile, the NDLEA has arrested a Brazil returnee, Udechukwu Ekene Theophilus, at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Ikeja, Lagos for ingesting 60 big wraps of cocaine.
Babafemi, who made the disclosure, said the suspect, who was arrested during inward clearance of passengers on Ethiopian Airlines flight from Sao Paulo, Brazil via Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at the D-Arrival Hall of the Lagos airport, on Sunday, January 21, 2024, initially refused to undergo body scan, raising health concerns in a desperate bid to evade arrest.
When he was, however, offered other options, he accepted to be placed on excretion observation and shortly after he was ushered into NDLEA observatory, he excreted the first set of cocaine pellets, after which he expelled a total of 60 wraps of the class A drug weighing 1.279 kilograms in five excretions.
In his statement, Udechukwu claimed he ingested the consignment in Brazil and was to discharge everything at the airport in Addis Ababa, but could only excrete 15 pellets, which he handed over to another member of his syndicate before his connecting flight to Nigeria was called.
In the same vein, NDLEA operatives at the Lagos airport, last Tuesday, recovered a total of 12 cartons of tramadol 225mg containing 599,900 pills weighing 385.40kg, from an overstayed cargo at the SAHCO import shed of the Lagos airport, after a joint examination with other agencies.
The tramadol consignment had come into the country in two batches on KLM Royal Dutch Airline flights from Karachi, Pakistan, between July 27 and August 1, 2023. They were, however, placed under watch by NDLEA operatives since then.
Not less than 822 kilograms of cannabis sativa hidden in a fuel station located at the Ashipa community, along the Badagry-Seme road, were recovered by operatives of the Seme Special Area Command of NDLEA, while a suspect Sani Audu, 35, was arrested with 111.3kg of same substance at Maigatari town in Jigawa State, last Tuesday.
