Liberia: Latest Cocaine Bust Valued At Over U.S.$300m, Weighs Nearly 4 Tonnes

MONROVIA — Liberian security forces have seized 3,971 kilograms of cocaine worth an estimated US$318 million from a warehouse in the VOA Community in Paynesville, and arrested two foreign men who were in possession of a firearm.

The seizure, made during a raid by a joint security team acting on a court-issued search-and-seizure warrant, is one officials say could be the largest the country has ever recorded. It is nearly 17 times the weight of the 237.6 kilograms intercepted at Roberts International Airport in June and roughly 40 times the value. At close to four metric tons, it ranks among the most significant hauls ever reported in West Africa. Officials say the drugs had likely been in the country for some time.

The two men who were taken into custody at the scene were identified as Johann David Garces Grajales, who holds both Colombian and Spanish passports, and Srdan Seles, a Serbian national.

Investigators, however, are not convinced the names are genuine. A member of the joint security team told The Liberian Investigator that searches of open sources, including Google and the deep web, returned no records for either of them.

"One of the things we're going to establish is whether the names in their passports are indeed their real names," the officer said. "It is a common practice for transnational drug dealers to conceal their real identities."

The operation grew out of a sustained intelligence effort to track the cartel, the officer said, but the scale of what the team found still caught it off guard. "We have been doing everything possible to track down the cartel. This was made possible through the intelligence we gathered," he said. The team expected to recover some quantity of drugs at the site, he added, but not this. "What we saw really blew my mind."

"Our preliminary analysis shows that the stash is indeed cocaine that weighs about 3,971 kg," the officer said, putting the estimated street value at roughly US$317.69 million. "This is huge, and this has been in the country for some time now." He said investigators would work to trace how the shipment entered Liberia.

Who owns the warehouse remains an open question. "So far, we have not been able to identify the owner of the property," the officer said. "We cannot also say whether the owner is linked to the cartel or not. But that's one of the areas the investigation would also focus on."

The arrests land in the middle of a widening reckoning with Liberia's role on the transatlantic cocaine route. The case that opened that reckoning began June 8 at Roberts International Airport, when customs and security officers intercepted 198 compressed plates of cocaine weighing about 237.6 kilograms and valued at roughly US$19.2 million, concealed in six cargo boxes falsely declared as Maggi seasoning cubes and lappas and bound for Europe.

That case took nearly a month to produce names, and when they came they described a network reaching into the institutions meant to stop it. Prosecutors charged five people. Paul J. King, an executive at Global Logistics Services, whose company handled cargo at the airport's GLS-Menzies terminal, is the only one to appear in a Liberian courtroom in person; he was interrogated at police headquarters, charged by the Justice Ministry's Special Investigative Team and forwarded to the Monrovia City Court, with his company charged alongside him. Michael U.S. Browne, also known as Rahim or Raheem Bah, is the most elusive figure, said to have remained in Monrovia for weeks after the seizure before slipping across the border into Sierra Leone; he was charged in absentia. Also charged were Oscar J. Browne, chief of intelligence for RIA Security; Emmanuel Kpah, whom police say delivered the shipment and the cash tied to the transaction; and Usman Ali, the United Kingdom-based consignee whose name was stamped on one of the boxes, likewise charged in absentia.

All five face trafficking and conspiracy charges, with criminal solicitation added in at least one instance. Announcing them, Inspector General of Police Col. Gregory O. W. Coleman said the seizure was no accident or clerical error but the work of an organized criminal enterprise exploiting the country's air cargo system, and that fugitive suspects were being pursued through arrest warrants, international cooperation, extradition requests and mutual legal assistance. Four of the five were charged in absentia.

Senators, including Amara Konneh, Darius Dillon, and Edwin Snowe, have called for a broader inquiry to question how seizures of that size resulted in no arrests before suspects left the country. The concern is genuine. In 2022, a jury acquitted all four defendants in the US$100 million Freeport cocaine case, which was then the country's largest, and the court ordered the seized cash to be returned. The lesson traffickers seem to have drawn is that Liberia's borders might sometimes catch a shipment, but its courts rarely catch a trafficker.

Read the original article on Liberian Investigator.