SomaliNet Forums

Hmmm......


Thats some find. I wonder what they will do with it.




http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6254496.stm



Deserted cocaine boat in Senegal
Cocaine (File pic)
Poor West African states are seen as a new hub for the drugs trade
The Senegalese authorities have found an empty sailing boat with 1.2 metric tons of cocaine on board, they say.

The boat was found near the Atlantic Ocean resort of Mbour, with the drugs divided into 50 bags of 24kg each - Senegal's biggest cocaine seizure.

Police say they found plane tickets from Brazil to Guinea-Bissau, now seen as a major drug-trafficking centre.

In Bissau, magistrates have condemned an ex-prime minister's statement that he ordered the destruction of cocaine.

The cocaine found in Senegal was worth some $100m on the streets of Western Europe.

Experts say that West Africa's poor, coastal countries are increasingly becoming a major hub in the trafficking of cocaine from Latin America to Europe.

There have also been large cocaine seizures recently in Ghana and Sierra Leone.

'Narco-state'

Former Guinea-Bissau Prime Minister Aristides Gomes said on Thursday that he had said the drugs should be burnt - following speculation that the haul had disappeared.


Police are woefully ill-equipped and often do not even have enough gasoline to operate their vehicles
Antonio Maria Costa
UN drug agency head

"Under pressure from me and my direct order the 674 kg of cocaine were burned in my absence," he said.

"Anyone who doubts that can take the affair to the courts."

But the Bissau magistrates' union says that the correct procedures for destroying the drugs were not followed.

It says it is concerned about the government's alleged role in the drugs' trade.

The cocaine was seized last September and was stored in a treasury vault before going missing.

Seven top officials were arrested over the affair but have not been charged.

Another 635kg of cocaine was found in Bissau in April but the United Nations drugs agency reports that traffickers escaped with almost two tons of the drugs, which had been flown into a military airstrip.

At the time, UN Office on Drugs and Crime head Antonio Maria Costa said he feared Guinea-Bissau could become a "narco-state" unless donors did more to make the police force more effective.

"It is regrettable that the rest of the consignment was not intercepted but hardly surprising as the police are woefully ill-equipped and often do not even have enough gasoline to operate their vehicles," he said.

It's Akon who is behind it......

Yupe the Canary Islands{ Spain / Europe} is just off the coast of neighbouring Mauritania.

GedoBoy,

Imagine if that blow hit Somalia's beaches Folks would be debating if it was flour, salt or sugar

seriously...drugs off the coast of West Africa en route to Europe is big bizzness......Guinea is AFrica's 1st narco-state.

Guinea-Bissau
Pushers' paradise

Jun 7th 2007 | BISSAU
From The Economist print edition
The drugs trade in the continent's first narco-state is booming

TAKE a long jagged coastline, a collapsed state, a collection of powerful politicians and soldiers keen to make a buck or more and you have a drug peddler's paradise. You also have Guinea-Bissau, a tiny former Portuguese colony on Africa's west coast that Latin American cocaine is pouring through, mostly en route to booming markets in Europe. The country has won the dubious honour of becoming Africa's drug-distribution hub and, some fear, its first narco-state.

Precise figures for a business as shady as drugs are hard to come by. But two fortuitous seizures of over 600 kilos of cocaine, worth over $30m each, during the past seven months alone give an idea of the scale of the problem.

Not that these seizures have stopped still more getting through. Drug-control officials say aircraft and boats laden with hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of cocaine still cross the Atlantic towards remote islands scattered off Guinea-Bissau's coast. A sophisticated logistics network allows the drugs to be dropped by air, dispatched to remote airstrips or ferried by speedboats far inland up winding mangrove-lined creeks where they are stored and prepared for their onward journey.
Click here to find out more!

They sometimes go to expanding markets in the Middle East and Far East, but Europe remains the main destination. The drugs are taken there via a range of networks—overland, often in Lebanese-owned vehicles, by sea or by air. They are hidden in vehicles, people or goods. Once, they were even secreted in giant edible snails going from Ghana to Ireland.

Since a bitter war to oust its Portuguese rulers, Guinea-Bissau has suffered dictatorship, coups and, at the end of the 1990s, another war. Cashew nuts aside, it has few natural resources and, in a region where far bigger conflicts have grabbed the limelight, it is all but forgotten by the outside world. The street value of the recent cocaine seizures was each the equivalent of more than 10% of Guinea-Bissau's annual GDP, so the allure of the drugs trade is understandable.

The government has belatedly asked for outside help and has set up an anti-drugs commission to look into allegations of complicity by politicians and officials. Those who really do want to take on the Colombian cartels face stiff resistance, often from their own colleagues. The police unit responsible for fighting the drug dealers is constantly impeded by other security services. In any case, there is seldom enough money or fuel to carry out raids; the police chief got his own car only after seizing one in a drugs raid. But he is anyway under intense pressure not to carry out any raids. Interference from top officials meant that the drugs seized in the country's biggest-ever bust last September have since disappeared and the two Colombians arrested have walked free. Even if they had been held, there wouldn't be anywhere for them to go as the country has no prisons.

The handful of brave local journalists who dare report on their country's role in the cocaine trade face increasing threats to shut them up. Your correspondent and a local colleague were hauled before the interior minister and threatened with prison after the local man wrote a report, picked up by Portuguese radio, airing allegations that the armed forces were dealing in cocaine. Plainly, soldiers are involved: some have been caught in the act. Drug experts say officers can earn up to $500,000 for securing a landing strip for deliveries.

Fearing how much cocaine is now moving around the region, America says it will step up its anti-drug presence there. The Europeans, meanwhile, are launching a Portugal-based anti-drugs task force. But the people of Guinea-Bissau are more worried that the lucrative business could fuel local violence, as factions vie for control of the precious white powder.

Abdiwahab252,

yeah let's hope they didn't cook w/ it....

Amazing drug! I have done it 4 to 6 and if I could get it I would just swim in it and lick the boat.