Kenya now cocaine trafficking hub
Pastor Dale Morgan
Kenya now cocaine trafficking hub*
POSTED: 0309 GMT (1109 HKT), September 14, 2006
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- A beach front mansion. A high-speed boat. And a
ton of cocaine. It sounds like "Miami Vice," but in Kenya it's real.
Until recently a backwater producer of marijuana and hashish, Kenya has
become a cocaine distribution hub, according to the U.S., the U.N. and
British diplomats. Traffickers from South America are taking advantage
of Nairobi's extensive air links to Europe and Asia, and spending piles
of cash to minimize government interference, they say.
"International drug trafficking rings have made inroads in Kenya and may
benefit from a climate of official corruption, which allows them to
operate with near impunity," says the State Department's 2006 drug
control strategy report.
The cocaine allegations are a further headache for a country already
caught up in the U.S.-led war on terrorism, and struggling to make good
on the reformist democracy it voted for when it elected President Mwai
Kibaki four years ago on an anti-corruption platform.
The reports of a burgeoning cocaine trade underscore how official graft
and complicity continue to thrive under Kibaki's government.
The wake-up call came in December 2004. Kenyan police, acting on a tip
from the Netherlands, raided a luxury housing compound in seaside
Malindi and a warehouse in Nairobi. Their haul was a record for Africa:
1.1 tons of cocaine, some of it hidden in a speed boat.
Investigators found that South American traffickers had moved into Kenya
because law enforcement was tightened in Spain, once a main transit
point for cocaine headed deeper into Europe, said Carsten Hyttel,
Eastern Africa representative of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
A former top Kenyan prosecutor, meanwhile, says he was fired for probing
too deeply into the 2004 cocaine haul. Philip Murgor charges that
corrupt or inept Kenyan police officers protected the smugglers from
prosecution. His allegations dovetail with the concerns expressed by
Western diplomats and U.N. experts over corruption in Kibaki's government.
The allegations are helping to make Kibaki's administration look
increasingly like the corruption-riddled, 24-year rule of his
predecessor, Daniel arap Moi. Moi's regime failed to crack down on drug
trafficking that included heroin, marijuana and hashish. Kenya has
frequent flights to Pakistan and India, making it convenient for heroin
couriers.
But the only drugs seized in large quantities in the past were marijuana
and hashish.
In a series of busts early this year, several Kenya Airways flight
attendants were arrested at London's Heathrow Airport carrying pounds of
cocaine.
Kenya has gone from zero cocaine seizures on flights out of Kenya to
"quite a few, so that is an obvious concern to us," Mark Norton,
spokesman for Britain's embassy, told The Associated Press in June.
George Kiragu, a Kenyan serving a five-year sentence in the Netherlands
for helping to smuggle cocaine there, charges that he's a victim of a
cover-up of corruption. He is resisting extradition to his homeland to
face charges related to the 2004 seizure, saying his life would be in
danger.
"The Kenyan authorities know who is guilty ... I'm being used as a
scapegoat. If we could get more information, it would be clear that
someone is being protected," Kiragu said during an extradition hearing.
Kenyan officials, including Police Commissioner Mohammed Hussain Ali and
Joseph Kamau, who oversaw anti-narcotics detectives as director of the
Criminal Investigation Department, did not respond to repeated requests
for comment about allegations of corruption surrounding the 2004 seizure.
Details of the case reveal the scope of the drug smuggling operations.
Kenyan police were tipped off about the shipment by their counterparts
in Europe, who had discovered 650 pounds of cocaine in a container
shipped from Kenya to the Dutch city of Zevenbergen on Dec. 7, 2004.
Five men, among them Kiragu, were convicted and sentenced to up to five
years.
A week after the Zevenbergen discovery, Kenyan police acting on
information from Dutch police made their record bust and arrested eight
people. Seven others were arrested in the case later, and two trials
were held, but only one person was convicted.
Rose Ougo, the magistrate who heard the first of the two cases,
acquitted all seven in that trial, and accused the police and
prosecution of doing a shoddy job, failing even to show that the
suspects handled the drugs.
Murgor, who had been criticized for his handling of high-profile cases,
claims he was fired as director of public prosecutions in May 2005
because he pressed for "a transparent investigation." He said the
acquittal confirmed his contention that there had been "a coverup by the
government, and in particular the police, designed to protect the barons
behind trafficking cocaine in and through Kenya."