Malian officials seized 750kg of ingredients used to make cocaine, following a nine-hour gunbattle with the suspected drug traffickers, customs officials said on Friday. No injuries were reported.
The operation occurred in Achiboro, located 1,300km northeast of Mali's capital, Bamako, on Tuesday, said the official, who asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.
Customs officials hunted down the traffickers and "exchanged fire on all sides," he said.
The suspects abandoned their two cars and then fled in a third vehicle, vanishing in a part of the country that is home to the turbaned Tuareg rebels, desert nomads that have launched an insurgency.
But the customs official said there is no evidence to suggest the men of Ibrahim Bahanga, who have in the past been accused by the government of drug trafficking, were behind this incident.
Last week, Bahanga released 10 Malian soldiers and security guards that had been taken hostage months earlier after brokering an agreement with authorities. Details of the agreement, reached on Dec. 26, were not made public.
Mali had signed a peace deal with the Tuaregs last year to end a war started in the 1990s, and which resumed after a Tuareg attack in May 23, 2006. The government promised to increase the development of roads and other infrastructure in the impoverished north -- the Tuaregs' home.
But Bahanga's Tuareg faction refused to sign the peace deal, saying it did not do enough to help the Tuareg minority.
West Africa has become an entry point for cocaine destined for Europe, where its price is now double what it is in the US.
The drugs originate in South America and are then funneled to the countries on Africa's western seaboard.
It is a strategy designed to elude European airport security and coastal patrols with smugglers shipping drugs, as well as the ingredients used to make the drugs, in bulk to Africa's western coast. From there, they are parceled out to hundreds of individual smugglers who use fishing vessels, cars and their own bodies to sneak it north via countries like Mali into Europe.
The UN's Office on Drugs and Crime says the world's total supply is around 1 million kilograms a year. Interpol says 200,000kg to 300,000kg of the drug enters Europe via West Africa every year.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
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