The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency has given full details of how the suspended head of the Intelligence Response Team, IRT, DCP Abba Kyari’s cover was blown as having a strong link with an international drug cartel.
Recall that The News Beam had earlier reported that Head of Media and Publicity of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Femi Babafemi, had declared Abba Kyari wanted today, February 14, 2022.
NDLEA revealed, in a statement, that the DCP had been invited by the NDLEA for debriefing on Thursday, February 10, but up till the close of office hours on Friday, February 11, he refused to respond. Up till this moment, he hasn’t responded.
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“Today, we are forced to declare one of such law-enforcement agents wanted in the person of suspended DCP Abba Kyari, the erstwhile Commander of Intelligence Response Team (IRT) at the Force Intelligence Bureau of the Nigerian Police Force.
“With the intelligence at our disposal, the agency believes strongly that DCP Kyari is a member of a drug cartel that operates the Brazil-Ethiopia-Nigeria illicit drug pipeline, and he needs to answer questions that crop up in an ongoing drug case in which he is the principal actor. His failure to cooperate forced the hand of the agency and that is the reason for this press briefing”, the statement read in parts.
The News Beam has compiled the key takeaways from NDLEA’s statement. Here they are:
1. On Friday, January 21, 2022, DCP Kyari contacted one of the NDLEA officers in Abuja at 2:12 p.m. They met, and Kyari informed him that his team had intercepted and arrested some traffickers that came into the country from Ethiopia with, according to him, 25kg of cocaine.
2. Kyari then asks that he and his team take 15kg of the cocaine, replace it with a dummy worth 15kg and leave 10kg for the prosecution of the suspects arrested with the illicit drug in Enugu.
3. The NDLEA Officer reported this to the agency and he was instructed to play along by 11:05 a.m. on Monday, January 24.
4. The officer then discovered that Kyari had shared the 15kg (already taken out) between the informants that provided information for the seizure and he and his men of the IRT of the Nigerian Police. According to him, the informants were given 7kg while his team took 8kg which was already sold.
5. He then offered to pay the NDLEA team (that is the officer and the FCT commander) by selling, on their behalf, half of the remaining 10kg, thereby further reducing the original cocaine for the prosecution to just 5kg. At N7 million per kilogramme, the proceed from the 5kg would amount to N35m, at the exchange rate of N570 per dollar being the black market rate for the day, January 24, 2022.
6. On the 25th of January by 5:23 p.m., Kyari met with the NDLEA official again informing him that the remnant of the original cocaine that would be delivered to NDLEA; five original packages marked with red dots. He also brought with him the money from the sale of the 5kg share of the NDLEA team, a total of $61,400. The official received the money in his car where sound and video recorders were already set up.
“It is disheartening to hear him say of this rogue team, and I quote: “I do take good care of them, and this kind of work is done by only that team.”
“It is equally disheartening to hear him give details of another similar operation which they pulled off, three weeks ago, according to him.
The agency, however, lamented about the safety of the officers involved in the case. The statement said, “I must say this publicly. We are not unaware of threats to the lives of NDLEA officers involved in this investigation, even as we continue to do our best to protect our officers and men in the line of duty.
“We are making this strong statement to those contemplating harmful action against NDLEA officers. They would only succeed in compounding their problems in the event of the murder of or harm to officers and men of NDLEA.”
“if anything, the arrests and seizures by NDLEA in the past 12 months is an indication that the country’s drug problem was grossly underestimated before President Muhammadu Buhari’s resolve to strengthen the NDLEA and the subsequent launch of offensive action by the Agency to clean the society of the menace”.
