Monrovia — Major General Forleh doesn't sound like a man who enjoys admitting his troops haven't caught up with a 41-year-old cargo ship. He says it anyway, plainly, because there isn't really a way around it. "We are still in pursuit of the vessel because it went into deep sea," he told FrontPageAfrica on Monday. "They are now around the Rivercess area side of the river. We can see them from our reach and our guys are giving us coverage. We are in hot pursuit."
Seeing it and reaching it, it turns out, are two different things. The order to search and seize the IB Atlantic IV came down a day earlier, once the vessel had drifted fully onto the Liberian side of the maritime border. Since then, it has done the one thing a ship in that position can still do: keep moving. What started as a search has become, in Forleh's own word for it, a pursuit -- and pursuits, unlike search orders signed in an office, depend on things like fuel range, weather and luck.
A Boat Not Built for This
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The first thing that went wrong was the hardware. Liberia's coast guard vessels, Forleh acknowledged, simply were not built to chase anything very far out to sea. "The boats the AFL using is not equipped enough to go deep into the ocean toward the direction of the Atlantic," he said. "It cannot go above certain nautical miles. It will signal that it's going too far. That's how we came back and we spent the night in Buchanan." A country trying to project authority over its own waters found itself, on the first night of the operation, simply outrun by geography -- its own boats warning their crews, by design, not to go any farther.
They tried again the next morning. "Since 7am they have been out there and not getting them, but we are trying our best to make sure we get to the boat," Forleh said Monday -- a sentence that manages to sound both determined and, if you read it closely, not especially confident. To close the gap, Liberia has now brought in help from outside its own fleet. "We have just engaged our partners from Nigeria to give us a wide coverage of the area," Forleh said. "They can see the vessel and their help is going a long way in helping us reach the vessel." Liberia, in other words, can now watch the ship it's chasing. Catching it is still a separate problem.
Did a Leaked Video Tip Them Off?
There's a second complication, and this one Liberia may have caused itself. Critics have pointed to the conduct of AFL soldiers on Sunday, when the pursuit first got underway, as a possible reason the vessel bolted for deeper water in the first place. One soldier, by multiple accounts, posted footage to Facebook of troops moving toward the ship just as the operation began -- the kind of real-time broadcast that, if the crew or anyone watching on their behalf saw it, would have given them all the warning they needed to run.
Forleh didn't dismiss the possibility. "Maybe they were so hyper and went and release the video of them going toward the ship -- and up to now, we are not sure what went wrong," he said. "We are investigating it." It is an unusually candid admission for a military officer to make about his own troops in the middle of an active operation: that excitement, or carelessness, or both, may have cost Liberia the element of surprise on the very ship its entire government has spent weeks worrying about.
Waiting on Sierra Leone
The chase didn't start the moment anyone wanted it to, either. For as long as the IB Atlantic IV sat on the Sierra Leonean side of the maritime border, Liberia held back -- not from lack of concern, but from a lack of legal footing to act. "We have been communicating with Sierra Leone to see how we could get across, but they were not giving us greenlight," Forleh said. "So, we were just buying time -- and we kept engaging the Chief of Staff of SL -- and later, when the vessel drifted to our side, we allowed them to come in a little bit."
That patience nearly paid off. "By the time we started moving toward the vessel, a heavy rain came and visibility made it difficult for our troops, and as we got closer, the vessel kept moving deep," Forleh said. Weeks of diplomatic back-and-forth with a neighboring military, resolved just in time for a rainstorm to undo it in an afternoon -- it is the kind of detail that makes the whole operation feel less like a manhunt and more like a bad stretch of luck, if you're inclined to believe luck is all it was. Communication with Sierra Leone has continued over the past 48 hours, officials say, and is described as improving, even as the ship itself keeps moving out of reach.
Where This Started
None of this began with soldiers or Coast Guard boats. It began with a letter. On July 13, Mark Egon Kuiah -- then Deputy Director for Operations at Roberts International Airport, weeks before his own dismissal in Liberia's cocaine scandal -- wrote to the Liberia Maritime Authority as registered agent for a company called Madris Group of Companies Incorporated, describing a vessel in distress with propeller damage and asking that it be granted privileges to dock at the Freeport of Monrovia. LiMA refused, telling FrontPageAfrica the request didn't add up: the ship was still sitting in Sierra Leonean waters, hadn't docked anywhere, and yet was already asking for a Liberian berth and a dive team.
The ship in that letter is the same IB Atlantic IV now running from Liberian troops off Rivercess. In the weeks between the rejected letter and this week's pursuit, authorities began looking into reports that a smaller vessel had approached it at sea and tried to throw something aboard -- the kind of detail that turns a disabled cargo ship's distress call into something that looks, in hindsight, a great deal more deliberate. Kuiah, for his part, has not been charged over the letter and has, by multiple accounts, been providing investigators with information in recent days. All of it sits inside a summer in which Liberia has already logged its two largest cocaine seizures on record, charged senior police commanders with escorting the drugs themselves, and dismissed or suspended at least ten officials across five government agencies.
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Still Out There
As of Monday evening, the IB Atlantic IV remained beyond Liberia's reach, somewhere off Rivercess, watched from a distance with Nigerian help but not yet boarded. Nothing about the ship's cargo has been confirmed, and nothing about the pursuit guarantees it will end differently than the chase for the four men who walked free after Liberia's last hundred-million-dollar cocaine case in 2022. What's different this time is how openly the country's own military is narrating its own shortcomings while the chase is still underway -- underpowered boats, an operational security lapses its own chief of staff won't rule out, and a border standoff resolved just in time for the weather to undo it. Whether that candor ends with the ship in port or simply with a clearer record of how it got away is, as of tonight, still an open question.
