- Safiu Kehinde
Operatives of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) have burst a cross -border kingpin, Akinbile Aikins, with the interception of consignments of captagon, widely known as ‘Jihadi drug’ and millions of opioid pills worth over N6.2 billion at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Ikeja Lagos.
Akinbile was nabbed with the captagon shipment seized at the Lagos airport on Saturday following the arrival of the suspect from Accra, Ghana, aboard an African World Airlines flight.
This was made known in a statement issued on Sunday by the NDLEA’s spokesperson, Femi Babafemi.
According to Babafemi, a search of Akinbile’s carton of local bathing soap, popularly called “Ghana Soap,” led to the recovery of 47,200 pills of the illicit amphetamine drug worth over N1.5 billion concealed within blocks of soap.
Captagon, which is notoriously dubbed the ‘Jihadi drug’ for its use in funding extremist activities in conflict zones, was first intercepted in Nigeria by NDLEA in September 2021 at the Apapa port in Lagos.
After his arrest, Akinbile claimed he was meant to deliver the consignment in the North.
In another successful interdiction operation at the Lagos airport, the NDLEA recorded the interception of no fewer than 3,900,030 tablets of Tramaking 225mg and Tapentadol 250mg.
The illicit drugs with a combined gross weight of 2,787.40 kilograms and more than N4.6 billion in street value, were recovered from four abandoned consignments at the import shed of the MMIA.
Three of the consignments, comprising 900,000 tablets of Tramaking (815.40kg), arrived aboard RwandAir flights from Bangladesh, while a fourth, comprising 3,000,030 tablets of Tapentadol (1,972kg), arrived on Qatar Airways from Amsterdam.
The shipments, which had been placed under close watch after no one showed up to claim them, were formally retrieved after a joint examination by NDLEA officers, Customs and other stakeholders on Friday 28th August.
In an earlier development, a 31-year-old US-returnee, Sowunmi David Oludotun, was on the 19th of August arrested by NDLEA operatives at Ikate area of Lekki after he showed up to take delivery of 3.350 kilograms of Loud, a synthetic strain of cannabis imported from the United Kingdom.