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Mozambique: South African Drug Trafficker Arrested
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
2 April 2008
Posted to the web 2 April 2008
Maputo
The Mozambican police have arrested a young South African woman at Maputo International Airport for trafficking in cocaine.
The spokesperson for the General Command of the Mozambican police, Pedro Cossa, told reporters on Tuesday that the woman, whom he did not name, was carrying 64 capsules of cocaine (each weighing 11 grams) in her stomach.
She had followed what has become a well trod route for cocaine traffickers - from Brazil to Maputo via Lisbon. But she was picked up when she disembarked from the TAP (Portuguese airlines) flight from Lisbon.
Earlier in March a young Mozambican woman, named only as Rosalina, was also arrested at Maputo airport. She had taken exactly the same route, and was carrying 3.65 kilos of cocaine in her stomach.
"The case of drugs coming from Brazil deserves further attention", said Cossa. "Generally the people carrying the drug don't know who the owners are at either end of the operation. The people we detain are just being used as carriers".
This is true up to a point. But the people carrying the drugs inside their bodies must have been told to contact somebody in Maputo, presumably somebody waiting for them at the airport. Yet these people, the next link in the chain that eventually leads to the major drug barons, have never been picked up by the police.
Cossa claimed that Mozambique is prepared to deal with international drug trafficking, and that the police have now placed experts in the subject at all the country's airports.
"It is likely that some people escape", he admitted, "but the percentage is minimal. There are no signs on the ground. We remain attentive to all international flights, and we believe that we will detain all people carrying drugs while they are still in the airport".
Yet if the police were as extraordinarily efficient as Cossa claims, then the drug lords would have shut down the Brazil-Lisbon-Maputo route, and they clearly have not done so.
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And arresting carriers at the airport, instead of following them to their next destination is a certain recipe for never breaking up the drug rings.
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| Copyright © 2008 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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