Kenya police seize three kg cocaine in coastal city
Mombasa, Kenya, Aug 4 (Xinhua/UNI) Kenyan anti-narcotics police seized 3 kilograms of cocaine worth 11.9 million Kenyan shillings (110,000 US dollars) in the coastal city of Mombasa on Saturday evening.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) and National Intelligence Service (NIS) police arrested Suleiman Juma Mujibu Mjikenda, 47, and Saady Bashur Omar Dawa, 59, during an operation at a residence in Kisauni area in Mombasa.
"We have been doing investigations about drugs business here in Mombasa. We have arrested these two and we are interrogating them," Washington Njiru, Coast regional head of DCI, told Xinhua.
The two prime suspects were arrested during the raid inside a house where the police recovered a suitcase from the residence of the accused persons containing assorted clothings.
Upon further search they discovered false bottoms on the sides of the suitcase containing a whitish substance that tested positive for cocaine, the police said.
"After tests by a government analyst, the substance was found to be cocaine weighing 2,979.4 grams of street value 11,917,600 shillings (110,000 dollars)," Njiru said.
Reports indicate that Suleiman is a prominent drug trafficker in the coastal region and has wide distribution networks.
Sources said the detectives had trailed the traffickers from Brazil where they sourced the drugs to Juba in South Sudan, through Kampala, Uganda, to Nairobi and finally to its final destination Mombasa.
Police are analyzing traveling documents and air tickets recovered inside the house believed to belong to other drug traffickers.
According to Njiru, Suleiman heads a narcotics distribution network in parts of Mombasa and Malindi, North Coast targeting local consumers and foreign tourists especially those from Italy.
Kenya's immigration department is probing how Suleiman, a Tanzanian, acquired a Kenyan identification card, according to Njiru.
He said the detectives are searching for Nasim Athman Mohamed, a middle-aged Kenyan woman who is said to have picked the drugs from Sao Paulo in Brazil.
The cocaine seizure was the first this year, but police believe the illicit narcotic trade has been going in Kenya's second largest city without being detected.
International agencies have in the past flagged off Mombasa port as a key facility which drug traffickers use to import and export drugs.
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