The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, or NDLEA, caught a man named Oguejiofor Nnaemeka Simonpeter at the big airport in Lagos. He is 29 years old and had come back from a country called Thailand. He was carrying illegal drugs called heroin that were worth a lot of money, more than 3.1 billion Naira.
They caught him on October 7, 2024, as the NDLEA said in their report.
Oguejiofor studied how machines work at a university in Anambra State, Nigeria. He came to Lagos on October 5, 2024, by flying from Thailand on a plane with Qatar Airways.
He stopped in Doha along the way, and his bags were supposed to go to a place called Accra in Ghana. But then, he asked to have the bags sent to Lagos instead.
When he got his bags, the NDLEA officers stopped him and checked them carefully. Inside two big suitcases, they found six backpacks. Each backpack had secret pockets with heroin inside. The heroin weighed 13.30 kilograms in total.
Oguejiofor told the officers that someone offered him $7,000 to carry the drugs. “I was supposed to give two to someone in Lagos and four to someone in Accra,” he admitted.
More Drug Finds at Sea Ports
The NDLEA found more illegal drugs at places where big ships come in, like Lekki Deep Seaport, Apapa Seaport, and Port Harcourt Port Complex between October 7 and 11, 2024. They found a lot of pills called tramadol and bottles of a syrup with codeine inside, worth a lot of money, adding up to N22.7 billion.
Officers found these drugs using smart clues and checked them completely with help from Customs and other safety teams.
Other People Caught
Besides this, the NDLEA caught another man, Okelue Chidera, in Anambra State with 50,000 tramadol pills.
In Edo State, they found a lot of cannabis, which is another kind of drug, weighing 1,050 kilograms at a bus stop area. In a village, they caught a man named Monday Akele, who had 110 kilograms of cannabis with him.
NDLEA’s Fight Against Drugs
The NDLEA is working hard to stop people from using drugs. They have programs to teach kids in schools and talk to people in different parts of Nigeria about why drugs are bad and why people should avoid them. They visited places like Cross River, Akwa Ibom, Niger, Oyo, Ebonyi, Edo, and Abuja to share this message.
Brig. Gen. Mohamed Buba Marwa, who leads the NDLEA, congratulated the officers for doing such a great job in stopping drugs from coming into the country and helping people learn to say no to drugs.
“The hard work and smart ways our officers use to stop drugs is really good, especially when we see more and more of these drug catches,” Marwa said.