President Joseph Nyuma Boakai has dismissed or suspended senior officials at Roberts International Airport, the Liberia National Police, the National Security Agency, the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency and the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection over the country's two record cocaine seizures, and ordered that those implicated be turned over for prosecution.
The action, announced Thursday by the Executive Mansion, is the widest personnel purge of the investigation so far and reaches into every institution that touched the shipments.
Among those dismissed is Mark Egon Kuiah, deputy director for operations at Roberts International Airport. His removal came a day after the president's son, Joseph Nyuma Boakai Jr., devoted part of a public statement to a friendship with a man he named as Mark Kuiah, describing him as a friend of many years who he had never had reason to believe was anything but law-abiding, and adding that friendship is not immunity from the law.
Also dismissed were Johnny Bolar Dean, the police commissioner for criminal investigation, intelligence and Interpol, and Patrick Doe, deputy director for administration at the National Security Agency. Dean had already been removed from his post last week after admitting he took US$10,000 to provide comfort to two suspects held in the airport case.
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The president recalled and suspended without pay Patrick Komasu, an NSA agent seconded to the LDEA, and placed him under investigation.
Boakai ordered the dismissal of all government and law enforcement employees implicated in the cases. Those named include the airport's security director, Mohammed O. Gbowrah, and LDEA deputy commander Moses Jallah, both stationed at Roberts International Airport.
Two police officers were dismissed over the use of official vehicles to move narcotics. The Executive Mansion named them as Anthony T. Blaye and Wadell W. Kwarbo, and said they moved a consignment from Vincent Town on the Bomi Highway to the vicinity of Mega Mart in Thinker Village, Paynesville.
That account sits alongside, and does not obviously match, the one Inspector General Gregory Coleman gave reporters hours earlier, in which the two men were said to have escorted narcotics from a landing site to a holding ground with police vehicles running ahead of and behind the load. Coleman did not name the route.
Four others were ordered dismissed and turned over to the Ministry of Justice for prosecution: NSA agents Jammel V. Jallah, Christian L. Nyantee and Albenigo Janior, and Caycee Nelson, procurement director at the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection.
The Executive Mansion said the removals are meant to hold public servants to account. "These actions demonstrate his Administration's resolve to ensure that no public official or government employee who engages in criminal conduct remains in public service," the release said.
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Boakai said the law would be enforced without fear or favor, directed security institutions to press the investigations further, and said everyone connected to the cases must go before the courts with due process observed.
The announcement followed the public destruction earlier Thursday of the cocaine recovered in both cases. The government put the Duazon haul at US$317 million and the June 8 airport seizure at US$19 million, a combined US$336 million, and said the two hauls together came to 4,169 plates.
