MEDIA & SOCIETY The West African Connection: Drug Barons Find New Route to the Streets of Britain Posted by on Sep 1, 2008, 20:32

Drug gangs are increasingly smuggling cocaine on to the streets of Britain using new routes through West Africa, a senior intelligence officer warns today.Latin American cartels are developing the route into Europe after a crackdown on transatlantic shipments, prompting the British agency that fights organized crime to expand the number of field officers it stations in countries such as Ghana to try to disrupt the trade. 

According to UN estimates, more than a quarter of the cocaine used by Europeans is now smuggled in through Africa. Rob Wainwright, the international director of the Serious and Organized Crime Agency (Soca), told the Guardian: “An increasing trend is bringing cocaine by aircraft instead of by boat into west Africa.  Then it is taken on by land or ship to Europe, across some dangerous and difficult terrain.”

Soca’s response comes amid concern that law enforcement initiatives are failing to stem the flow of drugs into Britain.  Wainwright said, Colombian cartels were exploiting countries recovering from conflict in the area to transport drugs to the European mainland. 

He said law enforcement activities aimed at large vessels crossing the Atlantic may have forced drug barons to switch tactics.  The ability of Latin American gangs to change smuggling routes was “a symbol of the globalization of the problem”.  “We are forcing criminals to raise their risk factors by turning up the heat and forcing them out of their comfort zones,” he said.

Soca was developing new links with West African countries to combat the trend, including the deployment of three new field officers.  At present, there is one liaison officer in the region.

“It’s too early to tell how much [cocaine] is arriving but it is not a small amount”, Wainwright said.  “It is something to be worried about.” He said perhaps one drug consignment a month was arriving in West Africa from Latin America. Three British teenage girls have been jailed for smuggling cocaine via Africa.  In May, Carly Plunkett, 19, was jailed for five and a half years after being stopped at Gatwick on her way back from the Gambia.  She had £250,000 of cocaine in her suitcase. Two north London teenagers, Yasemin Vatansever and Yetunde Diya, served a year in jail in Ghana after they were caught at Accra’s Kotoka airport last July carrying laptop bags containing cocaine worth £300,000. Customs officials believe the same gang was behind all three cases. In another operation last month, in which Soca was involved, six people were arrested in Fortaleza, Brazil, in connection with the shipment of 840kg (1,852lb) of cocaine intercepted off the coast of Ghana.  Police seized 700kg of cocaine at Sierra Leone’s main airport last month, while another big seizure was made recently in Guinea-Bissau.

One problem Soca faces is corruption among authorities and police forces in West Africa.  Soca said: “Corruption has always been in the back of our minds in difficult operating environments such as Africa.  It is a challenge to find partners who we can trust, but we are making headway.” The UN has highlighted the West African drugs trade as a growing problem.  Herve Ludovic de Lys, of the UN office for the co-ordination of Humanitarian affairs, estimated that more than a quarter of the cocaine Europeans consume reaches them through West Africa.  Although the exact size of West Africa’s drugs trade is unknown, De Lys said an estimated 40 tonnes of Latin American cocaine passes through West Africa each year, with an estimated value of around £907m.  He said the trade could fuel violence, destabilizing countries that were recovering from conflict, such as Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast.

A UK Drug Policy Commission report released last month said that law enforcement was failing to impede the supply of drugs into Britain, considered one of the world’s most lucrative markets.” It appears that additional enforcement efforts have had little adverse effects on the availability of illicit drugs in the UK,” the report said.  “Since 2000, average street prices in the UK have fallen consistently for heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis”.

The report also provided further evidence that cocaine, once considered a drug for the rich, is being sold in an adulterated form as a cheap drug targeted at young people.

“There is some evidence to suggest that a two-tier market for power cocaine has emerged in the UK during recent years at both wholesale and street levels.  These data suggest that there is now an expanding market for cheaper, heavily adulterated cocaine among young people and students, for example, and that higher purity cocaine is aimed at more affluent buyers”.

“The average street price for cocaine has fallen from £65 a gram in 2000, to between £30 and £50 – depending on the purity of the powder – in 2007, the report said. 

Harry Shapiro, of Drug scope, an independent centre of information of drugs, said: “Over the past 10 years, cocaine has become increasingly available in the UK.  While it still retains its glamour image, prices have fallen and put the drug within the reach of a wide range of people for whom cocaine has become an unremarkable part of their lifestyle.” It seems as if this process began with the break-up of the large cocaine cartels in Colombia during the early 1990s, resulting in the development of several smaller cartels that needed to find new outlets beyond the traditional US market.”

British women turn cocaine traffickers

Young British women are being targeted as mules on drug smuggling routes from Africa, customs officials believe.  Investigators fear recent cases may be evidence of much wider activity by a large-scale smuggling syndicate.

The latest teenager to be convicted is 19-year-old Carly Plunkett, who was stopped at Gatwick on her way back from the Gambia with £250,000 of cocaine in her suitcase.  She received a five and a half year sentence in May. 

Two north London teenagers, Yasemin Vatansever and Yetunde Diya, returned to Britain last month after serving a year in jail in Ghana.  They had been caught at Accra airport carrying laptop bags containing cocaine worth £300,000.

In each case, the young women had been groomed as smugglers with promises of holidays, expensive meals, clothes and jewelry.  Plane tickets for the three were booked at the same north London travel agents and by a man using the same name.

Vatansever and Diya had told their families that they were going on a school trip to France.  Plunkett’s parents thought she had gone for a break in Tenerife.

A source close to the investigations said: “This is the same gang and there are an awful lot of connections between the two.

“The plane tickets were booked at the same north London travel agents and by a man using the same name and with the same credit card.

“This gang circles around potential couriers, sizing them up. The three girls could be the tip of the iceberg”. But the source added: “Although plane tickets have been bought, inoculations organized and hotel accommodation in West Africa arranged, the three mules were only asked to return with a package.  Because they do not explicitly mention class A drugs, the authorities are finding it difficult to prove a conspiracy”.

Vatansever and Diya were 16 when they were caught.  The Ghanaian authorities said the teenagers had been promised £3,000 each as payment for taking the drugs to the UK.

Plunkett, who was jailed at Corydon crown court, was promised just £1,000 to bring some “weed” to Britain, according to her father, John Plunkett.

The former waitress, who had no previous convictions, was arrested days before her 18^th birthday.  Her father explained that his daughter had been groomed by “friends” whom she met just months before her arrest.  Plunkett, a railway engineer, from East-Bourne, East Sussex, described how his daughter had been groomed by the gang.

“They buy them things and offer them holidays, hairdos, clothes and nights out.  What girl wouldn’t want that?

“But there’s a price, there’s always a price to pay. These people can send 10 girls out there at a cost of £20,000.  If one gets through they make more than £100,000 profit”.

Carly told customs investigators that she had been approached by a man from London who had offered to take her to a club in the capital; he then showered her with gifts and finally offered her a holiday in the Gambia, which she could take with a female friend.

According to her father, on arrival in the Gambia Carly was booked into a dirty hotel, where she remained for four days before being approached by a Gambian national.

Plunkett said: “He took her to another hotel where he was staying and said to her, ‘if you want to get back to England you will be taking this weed with you and you’ll get £1,000’.  That was the only way she was going to get back, he told her”.

The 51 year-old described how he had watched his daughter being led to the cells after being sentenced.  “We were given one minute together before the hearing separated by a Perspex screen.  We were both crying our hearts out.  She kept saying ‘I’m sorry Dad, I’m so sorry Dad’.

“Carly was sobbing and shaking uncontrollably.  I felt so helpless at the other side of the glass. That was the last time I saw her”.