Two Ghanaians were accused by the Ghanaian authorities of allegedly aiding a Bolivian drug ring to smuggle approximately 5,800 kg of cocaine from Bolivia to Burkina Faso. The two accused are a businessman with connections in Latin America and an ex-officer of the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA). According to the prosecution,…
It is reported that Mali’s foreign minister Abdoulaye Diop asked the UN Security Council to support the government in the fight against drug traffickers and roll out an emergency aid package following the signing of a peace deal. At a meeting in Bamako the government an armed groups signed an accord to end the violence…
The increasing cooperation between Peru and Bolivia in the fight against drug trafficking led to the destruction of at least 50 clandestine airstrips in Peru and to the seizure of more than a dozen small planes in the Bolivian Amazon. In a joint operation of the US and the Costa Rican coast guards, police forces…
Two Nigerian men were arrested at the Akanu Ibiam International Airport in Enugu, Eastern Nigeria, and accused of drug trafficking and unlawful importation of 9.975 kg of heroin. The two drug traffickers were sentenced to 40 and 15 years of prison. The Chairman of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, Ahmadu Giade, declared that this…
A French soldier has reportedly been arrested while carrying 27kg of cocaine through an airport in Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, about to board a military transport aircraft bound for Paris’s Charles De Gaulle airport. A man has reportedly been arrested at Newark airport in New Jersey, USA, for attempting to smuggle cocaine from…
A paper published by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, a coalition of researchers, suggests that interventions by overseas donors against Islamist terrorists have contributed to, rather than contained, the instability and cycle of violence in Mali. Based on interviews with over 150 stakeholders in Mali and from the international community, “Fixing a Fractured…
This week the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) has released the European Drug Report (EDR) 2015. The report is the product of the established surveillance system that has evolved since 1995 and now incorporates data from 30 countries. The complexity involved in gathering, processing and analysing different information streams creates a…
Ross Ulbricht, the mercurial founder of ‘Silk Road’, what was once the biggest internet trading site for illicit drugs was sentenced to life imprisonment last week. The 31 year old Texan physics graduate rose to notoriety on the back of a site on the hidden “dark web” that became a trading mart for drugs and…
A sharp increase of seizures of multi-tonne cocaine loads on pleasure craft bound for Europe from the Eastern Caribbean testify to the increasing capacities of law enforcement agencies. On 23 May, Portuguese Polícia Judiciária searched a 24 metre long pleasure boat that had arrived at Faial island a couple of days before. Hidden inside a…
Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road marketplace on the dark web, through which more than US$200 million worth of drugs has been sold online, has been jailed for life in the United States. The Spanish police, in conjunction with the country’s navy, have seized almost 2 tonnes of cocaine headed from the Caribbean. Reportedly,…
