Authorities in Liberia face pressure over lack of apparent progress in an investigation following the confiscation of more than 200 kg of cocaine at the country’s international airport.
Following widespread outcry in Liberia about a lack of apparent progress in their investigation of a large airport cocaine bust, senior police officials appealed for patience and promised imminent arrests under intense questioning in a public hearing at the country’s senate Wednesday.
“We will make arrests. We have elevated people from persons of interest to suspects and we will make arrests in the coming days,” Gregory Coleman, Inspector General of the Liberia National Police told the full plenary of the Liberian Senate.
The senate called the special public hearing with Liberia’s joint security and national security advisers as public scrutiny grows following the seizure of 237.6 kg of cocaine at Roberts International Airport last month.
The Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency (LDEA) initially hailed the June 8 confiscation valued at roughly $19 million at Roberts International Airport as a breakthrough in Liberia’s fight against transnational drug trafficking.
“We are sending a clear message to international cartels: Liberia will not be a playground for your illicit trade. Our borders are being watched 24/7,” said LDEA Director General Fitzgerald T.M. Biago in the announcement of the bust.
But nearly a month after agents intercepted 198 compressed plates of cocaine hidden in six plastic cargo boxes that had been processed for export on a Brussels Airlines, law enforcement agencies are being heavily criticized for a lack of apparent developments in the case.
Authorities have issued no official updates about their investigation, while details have been leaked to traditional and social media, triggering concerns — widely discussed across the country and on social media — of a coverup.
“Shielding drug traffickers is one of the major problems facing our country. We urge the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency and the Liberia National Police not to protect anyone caught trafficking drugs,” said Rev. Kortu Brown, former president of the Liberian Council of Churches, in an interview this week.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports that the coast of West Africa, where Liberia sits, is a key trafficking region for cocaine being moved from South America to consumer markets in Europe.
The public senate hearings were called Wednesday by a pair of prominent Liberian senators, Senators Amara Konneh and Edwin Melvin Snowe, who echoed public sentiment that LDEA’s current probe into how the drugs made their way into the airport “appears to be an unacceptably slow investigative process.”
“To date, there has been limited official communication on the status of the investigation, no publicly known arrests of principal suspects, and an unsettling silence from key national security and law enforcement institutions,” they wrote in their letter Tuesday to Senate Chair Nyonblee Karnga-Lawrence.
Last week Liberian President Joseph Boakai responded to mounting pressure over the lack of apparent progress in the case by appointing a Joint National Security Investigative Task Force to examine how the cocaine shipment passed security and was moved through the airport’s cargo-handling process.
That has led Liberia’s Ministry of Justice to name at least 10 persons of interest related to the bust, including the general manager of an express handling service, the CEO of a logistics company, an intelligence officer at the airport, and several security officers.
One of the persons of interest, Paul J. King, general manager of GLS Menzies handling service, which operates the warehouse where the cocaine was intercepted, has denied involvement and formally requested witness protection after turning himself in to the task force.
King allegedly told investigators that a man named Rahim Bah was the shipper of the packages containing cocaine.
However, joint investigators said a review of King’s phone records revealed that the number he attributed to Bah is registered to a former Roberts International Airport communications staffer dismissed and arrested in 2024 for allegedly attempting to traffic more than $1 million worth of methamphetamine on a Brussels Airlines flight.
In recent days, concerns have mounted that the former communications staffer had not been named as a person of interest in the case, nor had another individual captured on CCTV carrying out a bank transaction that investigators say was linked to the drug shipment.
In his Wednesday testimony, the police inspector general told the senate that “there is a massive manhunt on” for the former airport staffer who was “currently at large.”
https://www.occrp.org/en/news/liberian-senate-grills-police-about-19m-airport-cocaine-bust
