Published: June 29, 2026
MONROVIA - Days after the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency announced the US$19.2 million cocaine bust at Roberts International Airport, surveillance footage and photographs of boxes being scanned in the cargo hall flooded social media, pushing a claim that the June 8 seizure caught only the unlucky load, while an earlier 100 kilograms had slipped through the same airport on May 22.
Documents and photographs obtained by The Liberian Investigator show that the claim is untrue. The May 22 consignment did not slip through any airport. It was cleared by British Customs at London's Heathrow Airport and was signed for by its named recipient on June 3, a delivery recorded on paper from Monrovia to Birmingham.
The leaks began almost as soon as the LDEA confirmed the seizure of 233 kilograms of cocaine on June 8. The Ministry of Justice and the agency had said from the start that they would release little, arguing that disclosure could damage a sensitive transnational case. LDEA Officer in Charge Fitzgerald T.M. Biago called the investigation active, complex and transnational, and warned that premature disclosure could compromise intelligence operations and the integrity of the evidence. The secrecy, however, did not hold. Within days, the case was leaking: surveillance clips, photographs, audio recordings, and the names of suspects turning up on Facebook, Instagram, and local blogs.
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The most detailed account came from Verity News, an online outlet whose reporting has driven much of the pressure on the case. It reported that once the drugs reached Liberia, they were stored at the homes of GLS General Manager Paul King and GLS Chief Executive Officer Peter King, and it questioned how an initial 100 kilograms and a later 233 kilograms entered the country, who transported them, and why a company called Emre Venn was listed as the consignor. It cited statements attributed to Andy Abdullai placing the cocaine at the Kings' residences, and a nurse linked to Paul King reportedly told investigators the same. The reporting has fueled calls for the LDEA to name Abdullai as a person of interest, for the Ministry of Justice to freeze the accounts of GLS Menzies, EHS Africa Logistics, and their executives, for call logs and CCTV footage from both firms and the airport to be seized, for the extradition of Paul Jamaal King from the United States, for the arrest of Peter King, Arthur Abdullai, and others, and for GLS and EHS to be suspended from airport operations.
On the May 22 shipment itself, according to media reports, about 100 kilograms of cocaine packed in four boxes reached the cargo facility around 3:30 p.m., it reported, carried in a yellow taxi and dropped off by Emmanuel Zeon, an Express Handling Services Africa Logistics employee whom lawmakers would later ask Justice Minister Cllr. Oswald Tweh Sr. to account for by name. Airport staff received the boxes at the GLS-managed screening area and ran them through an X-ray under security supervision, but the images were unclear. The standard next step, a physical inspection and joint verification by the relevant agencies, never fully happened. The boxes cleared for export anyway. The shipment left Monrovia on Brussels Airlines flight SN241 at 9:06 p.m. on May 22, transited Brussels the next day, continued on flight SN2103, and reached Heathrow about 10:25 that night. Media reports placed its street value above US$8 million and described both the May and June loads as moving through a coordinated network of people inside and outside airport operations.
Documents obtained by The Liberian Investigator for the consignment include a photograph of a shipping label affixed to a grey HDX-branded storage tote, a Heathrow cargo handling invoice, and a Swissport Cargospot release note. All three references Air Waybill 020-07366914, four pieces totaling 100 kilograms, the same weight and piece count reported in both mainstream and social media. The shipper is listed as Emre Venn Group of Companies, carrying Liberia Revenue Authority taxpayer identification number 2310779368710. The consignee is Usman Ali, at an address in Bordesley Green, Birmingham. The cargo was moved on flight SN2103 on May 23, the same leg some media houses also documented.
What the leaked footage never showed is what the release note records obtained by The Liberian Investigator show. The cargo was collected at Heathrow on June 3, signed out to a person identified as O. Dibba, with payment processed by Mastercard (***7358) through Swissport GB, and a gate entry noting the pickup was made on foot. The consignee's contact details list a phone number that carries a French country code (+3316842100420), despite the British address. The three documents describe a shipment that was screened, flown, customs-cleared in two jurisdictions, and physically handed to someone who walked into a Heathrow cargo facility to retrieve it.
The Monrovia failures described in media reports do not explain how the same boxes then crossed Brussels and cleared British customs. The UK Border Force, working with the National Crime Agency, runs intelligence-led searches on inbound air freight and is seizing cocaine at record levels, nearly 150 tonnes of drugs worth 2.6 billion pounds in the year to March 2025. Between June and August last year alone, Border Force pulled more than 1 billion pounds of cocaine off arriving shipments, with Heathrow a routine site of major cargo hauls. A 100-kilogram load does not pass through that, sit in a bonded warehouse for days, and then leave the gate with a collector on foot.
A Europe-based security expert who spoke to The Liberian Investigator on condition of anynomity said, if the May 22 boxes cleared every checkpoint between Monrovia and Birmingham, the likeliest reason is that they carried legitimate goods, a trial run to test whether the corridor and the people behind it could move freight cleanly before the real load followed. "June 8 would then be the genuine shipment, the one that was caught. On that timeline, the corridor is the story, not an earlier bust that never happened, and the viral version has it backward, reading a delivery as a near miss," he said.
In the 2022 prosecution, over 520 kilograms valued at US$100 million that came through the Freeport of Monrovia, the jury acquitted all four defendants, and the court ordered the seized cash returned, a verdict the justice minister of the day condemned. Charges often collapse over weak chain-of-custody records, limited forensic capacity, and the difficulty of proving who owned the cargo. "Every piece of evidence that surfaces online before it reaches a courtroom makes the evidence weak, and a shipment wrongly labeled cocaine hardens a public expectation," the expert said.
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Having seen the documents obtained by The Liberian Investigator, he noted that investigators should be concerned who O. Dibba is and should also try to trace the mastercard that paid for the release at Heathrow as it leaves a financial record.
"The Mastercard payment leaves a financial record. The shipper's tax number can be checked against Liberia Revenue Authority records, and the consignee's French-coded phone number is worth looking up. Those threads, not the footage, point to what the corridor carried and who stood at each end of it," he said.
The security expert who is familiar with drug investigation further told The Liberian Investigator: "A 100-kilogram shipment left Monrovia on May 22, passed through Brussels, cleared British customs and was signed for in London on June 3. They do not prove it was the drug now driving a national investigation. Until someone shows the contents were tested and came back cocaine, the footage and paperwork making the rounds prove only that a shipment moved, cleared and arrived. The question worth asking is why a case the government said it could not discuss has been narrated to the public through leaks, and why the loudest of them sent everyone chasing a shipment that was simply delivered."
