African country, bounded by Senegal, with a narrow Atlantic
coastline.
Law enforcement officers in The Gambia discovered nearly
three tonnes of cocaine in a salt shipment from Ecuador, its drugs
agency said Friday, in the tiny West African country’s largest-ever
seizure.
Officers searching a container in the port of the capital Banjul
on Thursday found 118 bags of the illegal white powder, which were
labelled as industrial salt, according to a statement from The
Gambia’s Drug Law Enforcement Agency (DLEAG).
The container was part of a consignment of four containers
originating from the Ecuadorian port of Guayaquil.
Lamin Gassama, DLEAG’s intelligence director, told AFP that the
2.9 tonnes (6,400 pounds) represented the largest ever drugs haul
in The Gambia — a poor nation of some two million people, and the
smallest on mainland Africa.
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He added that the seizure was worth approximately $88.5
million.
In its statement, The Gambia’s drugs agency said that local law
enforcement is searching for the consignment’s owner, a 37-year-old
French national named Banta Keita.
West Africa is an important transit region for cocaine
trafficked from South America into Europe, according to the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Seizure of the narcotic across the African continent rose from
1.2 tonnes in 2015 to 5.6 tonnes in 2018, the agency said in a
report in June.
AFP