At least 1,760,460 pills of Tramadol and other opioids were found disguised in Indomie Noodles boxes and other items at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, in Ikeja, Lagos, as well as in Gombe State, according to the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA).
On Monday, December 12, and Tuesday, December 13, the Lagos airport’s SAHCO import shed discovered over 600,000 Tramadol 225mg pills coming from Karachi, Pakistan in two separate shipments on Ethiopian Airlines flights. On Wednesday, December 14, the airport’s SAHCO export shed discovered 5,960 Rohypnol pills hidden in 60 packs of Indomie Noodles headed to Johannesburg, South Africa.
A female freight agent named Olaleye Adeola has already been detained in connection with the Noodles shipment, according to NDLEA spokesperson Femi Babafemi.
In a related incident, Akunne Chibuzor Tochukwu, a trader at the Balogun Market in Lagos Island, was detained on Tuesday, December 13, in cooperation with the Zone 2 Police headquarters in Lagos, for attempting to export a Tramadol shipment to Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
On November 25, NDLEA agents detained the shipment at the Lagos airport while Oke Abosede Ronke, a market laborer whose services had been sought to transport the narcotic for export, had already been detained.
On Sunday, December 11, NDLEA agents in Lagos stopped a truck and a bus that were transporting 113 jumbo bags of cannabis sSativaweighing 4,802.84 kilograms as they passed through the VGC estate neighborhood of Ajah. Three suspects, Taofeek Yusuf, Ifeanyi Okorie, and Israel Nwachukwu, were also detained in connection with the seizures.
The NDLEA also claimed that a drug dealer named Chucks Kalu, 29, tried to smuggle 26 kilograms of cannabis into Kano hidden inside blender packs, but his attempt was foiled by its agents who stopped the shipment along the Abuja-Kaduna express road and later detained him in a follow-up operation in Kano; meanwhile, another suspect named Rabilu Sa’ad Abubakar, 42 was also detained in a follow-up operation in Kano
