Tue, Nov 13, 2007 page9

• UK drug trail lures mules

  Cartels get drugs from Colombia to Europe by recruiting poor teenagers to do the dirty work

  • By Dan McDougall / THE OBSERVER
  • • 
    • 
    • 

  The condoms are smeared in margarine or local vegetable oil "to help them slip down," said Kawko, holding out the white grains of pure cocaine in his scarred palm. Behind him, on the palm-tree fringed beach of Prampram village, dozens of colorfully painted longboats make land, the bulky wooden vessels heaved and roped out of the roaring Atlantic by slender teenage boys.

  "There are many other couriers here in Ghana; some have made a dozen journeys to London and Amsterdam. You can see the benefit it has brought to their families, even here in our village. Their mothers have stopped working; some have motorbikes and have bought fishing boats. Some have also died," Kawko said.

  "A school friend of mine swallowed over 50 condoms and died within an hour. He dipped the condoms in honey and they ruptured. He was foolish; the condoms were local, not imported," Kawko said.

  

  Kawko gestures to where his youngest son is playing in the sea with a yellow plastic oil drum.

  "I wouldn't want this life for him," he said.

  Over the past few years, a concerted shift in trafficking routes has transformed West African countries like Ghana, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau into volatile hubs for cocaine smuggled from South America to a booming European market. Using sophisticated transportation networks and the latest communication technology to elude woefully inept coastguards, Colombian traffickers are establishing transit areas along the Gulf of Guinea that can only worsen lawlessness in countries already overwhelmed by crime, poverty and instability.

  For locals the route opens up a risky but tempting way out of poverty. A single flight to Amsterdam from Ghana, via Morocco, earlier this year carried 32 West Africans, all of whom had swallowed cocaine packets or concealed them in their luggage. Impatient with the increasing arrest rates of mules, the South American cartels have recruited London-based Nigerians and Ghanaians to scour the city for gullible teenage drug couriers.

  Last week two teenagers were seized at Accra airport, en route for London Gatwick. The 16 and 19-year-olds, both Lithuanian boys living in south London, were arrested under the British-led Operation Westbridge, a joint project by HM Revenue & Customs and the Ghanaian authorities to catch drug smugglers using Accra as a gateway to the UK. The pair were allegedly caught with nearly 4kg of cocaine ingested in around 16 condoms.

  It came after July's seizure of 16-year-old London schoolgirls Yasemin Vatansever and Yutunde Diya, who were stopped leaving the country allegedly carrying ?300,000 (US$625,160) of cocaine hidden in laptop bags. A narcotics officer who interrogated the girls claimed the teenagers knew exactly what they were coming to do in Ghana. They were, he claimed, "classic mules" recruited in London to come to Ghana and pick up the bags for a fee of ?3,000. Up to 60 mules a week are estimated to arrive in Britain from the region.

  The rain falls heavily on the bumpy road to Kumasi, churning it to red slushy mud. Here, 50km from the Ghanaian capital, Accra, is Nswana Prison. For its two recent occupants, Vatansever and Diya, the international fight against South American drug cartels is of little concern. The girls, who had told their parents they were going on a school trip to France before flying to Ghana, fit the classic drug mule profile -- young, poor and gullible. They have spent most of their time in isolation. In the past two weeks Vatansever is believed to have contracted malaria.

  Conditions inside the high-walled compound are grim. Each day the inmates are employed in hard labor, building an irrigation plant. The cramped cells often fit as many as a dozen prisoners who share toilet facilities. Disease and violence are rampant.

  For the past few days, officials have been temporarily holding the teenagers at Ghana's Narcotics Control Board, on the top floor of the innocuous office block. After reaching the floor where the girls were held, this reporter was turned back by a machine-gun toting guard. The girls, he said, were well. We heard them shouting from their makeshift cells.

  The trial of the British schoolgirls will resume in Ghana this week and both are expected to be sentenced to up to five years in prison. They are being tried under Ghana's Juvenile Justice Act, meaning that their trial must be completed within six months and they can only be held on remand for three months.

  The girls "vigorously deny" the charges, according to Fair Trials Abroad, which helped to find lawyers for the pair and has been liaising with the families and the British Foreign Office.

  Fair Trials Abroad lawyer Stephen Jakobi said the case bears striking similarities to that of two Birmingham teenagers who were jailed in Thailand after being found with ?4 million in heroin. Karyn Smith, 18, and 17-year-old Patricia Cahill spent three years in the infamous "Bangkok Hilton" prison before being pardoned in 1993. They claimed they were forced to confess by Thai police who planted drugs on them to claim reward money.

  "You've got two very young girls going through an airport where they were bound to get caught. There are lots of parallels, and it seems to me extremely probable that these girls were being used as decoys. As there were British officers involved in their arrest it would have made sense to allow them through to Britain and arrest them there, not leave them in Ghana," Jakobi said.

  Almost all of the Ghana-based mules used by drugs gangs are poor and willing to risk not only their liberty but their lives for less than ?500. The mules are all paid an initial fee, sometimes as low as ?50, with the rest payable upon a successful handover. If they are arrested, they will not get paid and the debts they left behind will be passed on to family members.

  According to British Revenue and Customs head of operations Tony Walker, the region is of increasing concern to the British authorities.

  "The air courier route from West Africa, either directly to the UK or in transit through other EU airports, is a specific threat," he said. "The use of such young people in smuggling drugs demonstrates the ruthless nature of those criminal gangs involved in the illegal narcotics trade and the misery they cause."

  As well as providing a number of British undercover operatives on the ground, Operation Westbridge has supplied technical and operational expertise to the Ghanaians. Since last November, Westbridge has made 122 interceptions, seizing 356kg of cocaine, 2,275kg of cannabis and 1.3kg of heroin. It follows the success of Operation Airbridge, a joint UK-Jamaican initiative to catch drugs couriers with internal concealments before they board planes from Jamaica.

  But there are fears that without the full-time aid of a British task force, local authorities will be unable to cope.

  "The British have only left a small team behind," one Ghanaian Customs Office worker said. "We have some equipment on loan but our surveillance experience is minimal. We don't have sniffer dogs, we don't have enough scanners; it is all about profiling and gathering intelligence and we need the British to attain that, not just temporary assistance."

  Harvested in the foothills of the Andes in Colombia, Peru or Ecuador by cartels, the leaves of the coca plant are processed in laboratories using kerosene, methyl alcohol and sulfuric acid. The resulting powder is dried, cut into blocks and transferred to ports in Colombia and Venezuela -- routinely these days, for shipment to West Africa. It is then cut into smaller amounts and sent to Europe.

  The US is the world's top market for cocaine, but use there is declining. In Europe, demand is rising. A kilogram of cocaine brings about ?25,000 in Europe, compared with about half that in the US. London has become the center of Europe's market. Not surprisingly, the smuggling routes are as complex as they are diverse.

  In April eight European nations, led by Britain, launched a military-law enforcement task force to target cocaine traffic from Africa. The Maritime Analysis Operations Centre, based in Lisbon, teams police with navy and customs resources from across Europe, a model similar to Florida's Drug Enforcement Agency.

  Because of historic ties to Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula remains a key gateway, with around 30 percent of Britain's cocaine coming in through Spanish corridors. The drugs are stockpiled in West Africa and then moved to clandestine landing zones on the coasts of Spain and Portugal, or commercial ports such as Barcelona and Antwerp, before reaching London in fishing vessels and commercial ship containers.

  In September, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) tipped off the Spanish coastguard to a ship from Venezuela hauling 15 tonnes of cocaine. The ship off-loaded four tonnes to a smaller vessel in the Atlantic. Spanish authorities intercepted the smaller load near Ibiza, where the cocaine had been transferred to fast boats operated by Bulgarians and Croatians. The Spaniards then caught up and intercepted the mother ship heading for Ghana.

  Of particular concern to the DEA are Ghana and Guinea-Bissau. In Ghana, top officials were accused last year of protecting a Venezuelan drug lord. Ghanaian police also recorded the continent's biggest cocaine bust last year, arresting Ghanaian and Nigerian suspects in a Mercedes van containing around two tonnes of the drug concealed inside boxes of fish.

  Fronted by Colombian cartels, local gangsters in the region have even set up elaborate front companies which allegedly buy high-level protection for the business interests of their new South American partners. Most aren't difficult to spot. In Accra, Ghana's capital, BMWs, Mercedes and newly imported canary yellow Humvees stand out from the beaten and battered local taxis.

  As an example of how high up the lure of drugs money reaches, you only need look at the recent case of the Ghanaian member of parliament Eric Amoateng. While serving in parliament, Amoateng sent 70kg of heroin, hidden in boxes of pottery, to the US and was arrested in January last year when he arrived at New York's JFK airport to collect it.

  Narcotics seizures in West Africa jumped eightfold in 2006, according to the latest Europol statistics. But it said in a report last year that "only a very small proportion of the cocaine passing through the continent is actually being seized."

  Experts worry that traffickers could eventually smuggle in precursor chemicals and set up labs, enabling them to ship coca base across the Atlantic instead of the more expensive finished product.

  At a recent major seminar on narcotics, attended by some of the world's leading law enforcement experts, the connection between West Africa and the scourge of drugs in Europe was spelled out.

  One of the speakers, Karen Tandy, head of the DEA, said: "Latin American gangs are setting up shop in Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea-Bissau in the West and Kenya in the East. Africa has emerged as a real hotspot in just the past couple of years. Africa will become, in terms of a drugs hot-bed, one of our worst nightmares if we do not get ahead of that curve now."
• Most Popular

  • 1

    Ministry lifts overseas limits on TSMC

  • 2

    New missiles to be deployed in north

  • 3

    Chinese spy prosecutions tripled in four years

  • 4

    TSMC has begun 4-nm chip production in US, official says

  • 5

    Snowfall a reminder of former ski resort on Hehuanshan