The criminals who planted drugs in Saudi passengers’ luggage

NIGERIANS were shell-shocked recently when the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) uncovered how a criminal syndicate at the Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport (MAKIA), Kano, loaded bags containing illicit drugs into an aircraft and affixed the names of three unsuspecting Nigerian pilgrims to them. The victims eventually got arrested and detained by the authorities of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. According to the agency, its investigation established that the detained pilgrims — Mrs. Maryam Hussain Abdullahi, Mrs. Abdullahi Bahijja Aminu, and Mr. Abdulhamid Saddiq — were victims of a trafficking conspiracy. This conspiracy, it said, was orchestrated by a syndicate at the helm of which was a certain 55-year-old, Mohammed Ali Abubakar, alias Bello Karama. He is currently in NDLEA custody.

At a press briefing held at the NDLEA headquarters in Abuja on Monday, August 25, the agency’s Director of Media and Advocacy, Femi Babafemi, said each of the three pilgrims, who left Nigeria for Saudi Arabia on August 6 via an Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET940 from Kano to Jeddah via Addis-Ababa, got tagged with extra bags without their knowledge. The receiving country’s scrutiny later revealed that those bags contained illicit substances. “Mrs. Maryam Hussain Abdullahi, while embarking on this flight, only checked in one luggage weighing 9 kilograms… Following this allegation, she was detained in Jeddah and is still in detention to date. The case of the other two persons followed the same pattern and was reported to the Agency shortly after Maryam Hussain’s complaint,” Babafemi said. As the NDLEA further disclosed, some staffers of Skyway Aviation Handling Company were discovered to be members of the syndicate whose stock-in-trade was incriminating unsuspecting passengers. Said the NDLEA spokesman: “The bags were traced to one Ali Abubakar Mohammed (aka Bello Karama), the leader of the syndicate… interestingly, he travelled to Jeddah on the same date aboard Egypt Air rather than Ethiopian Airlines, where he had planted the contaminated bags against the pilgrims’ names.”

The agency confirmed that it had arrested six members of the syndicate who are currently in custody, and that four of them — Ali Abubakar Mohammed, Abdulbasit Adamu, Murtala Akande Olalekan, and Celestina Emmanuel Yayock — had already been charged to court. NDLEA also claimed that the suspects had confessed to their roles in the crime, and that Celestina had admitted to checking in two of the bags for a fee of ₦100,000, while another suspect, Jazuli Kabir, acknowledged receiving a similar payment for the same task. The NDLEA said its Chairman/Chief Executive, Brig-Gen. Mohamed Buba Marwa (Retd), had begun an engagement with the Saudi Arabian authorities with the aim of securing the release of the victims. “The Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of the Agency is presently on his way to attend an International Drug Conference, which will be attended by a delegation from the General Directorate of Narcotics Control (GDNC). He intends to meet them one on one, to present our findings and seek the cooperation of our Saudi counterparts in ensuring that Mrs. Maryam Hussain Abdullahi and the two others get the justice they deserve,” Babafemi said.

In their quest for wealth, many Nigerians manifest utter wickedness. Indeed, the fact that the quest for filthy lucre could scar the minds of the suspects in this case to such level of cruelty is scary. Knowing that the price of conviction for drug trafficking in Saudi Arabia is death, the suspects in this case still used innocent persons as cannon fodder. This is wickedness at its extreme.  The members of this syndicate do not deserve to be counted among humanity: their actions are manifestly inhuman. Again, the system that allows this kind of wicked imposition on innocent travelers deserves scrutiny. How can innocent people trying to fulfill a religious obligation be traumatised in this manner? How did the accused staffers of Skyway Aviation Handling Company successfully perpetrate this crime without being detected? Are there no double-checking mechanisms to ensure that these desk staff are not the last checking points for travel transactions?

There are so many risks inherent in this case in spite of the interventionist efforts by the NDLEA Chairman/Chief Executive. With this unfortunate incident involving three passengers of Ethiopian Airlines, every Nigerian traveler is potentially at risk of being tagged with strange luggage and charged with drug possession in foreign countries. Syndicates successfully planting drugs in aircraft means that no traveller is truly safe, because passengers whose luggage have been checked in have no means of monitoring them until they receive them after disembarking from the aircraft. Luggage handling is either honest or passengers are in peril. And, by the way, for how long have drug syndicates been putting the lives of innocent people in danger? This surely could not have been the first time this has happened.

We urge the Nigerian government to do everything it can to secure the release of the innocent pilgrims in Saudi Arabia. They have done nothing wrong. On the other hand, the members of airport drug syndicates should be fished out, prosecuted and given the maximum sentence allowed by law. Unless and until this is done, Nigerians travelling abroad or even within the country will be in veritable danger of being wrongly charged with drug trafficking.

READ ALSO: Drug kingpin, five others in NDLEA net over arrest of three Nigerians in Saudi Arabia