A 38-year-old South African lady, Jessica Ann Will, has been arrested by operatives of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport (NAIA) Abuja after she was found to have concealed 14 large blocks of heroin weighing 5.75 kilograms in her luggage, using her three-year-old son as a cover to beat security checks and evade thorough screening.
She was arrested on July 6, 2026 during the inward clearance of passengers on a Qatar Airways flight from Doha, Qatar to Abuja.
Though Will initially denied travelling with check-in bags, but after operatives were able to quickly establish that the two bags containing the drugs had tags which tallied with the claim tags attached to her passport, she recounted and admitted ownership of the bags, adding that she forgot she checked in the two bags.
She claimed to have travelled from Cambodia through Doha to Abuja.
Intelligence leading to her arrests indicated that she is a member of a transnational drug trafficking organisation along with her husband/partner, Jan Coenraad De Jager, based in Cambodia, from where they operate their drug network along the Cambodian-South African axis.
In another successful interdiction operation, NDLEA officers at the terminal 2 arrival hall of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Ikeja, Lagos on June 28, 2026 intercepted a commercial motorcycle operator, popularly known as Okada rider, 48-year-old Onyechere Daniel Chinadu, following his arrival from Madagascar via Addis Ababa aboard an Ethiopian Airways flight.
A thorough search of his backpack, which he had checked in, led to the discovery of 87 wraps of methamphetamine concealed within clothes in his bag.
In his statement, Chinadu claimed he had been working for 15 years as an Okada rider in the Oke-Afo area of Lagos before his Uganda-based friend recruited him into drug trafficking.
He said he ingested the recovered pellets of methamphetamine in Uganda before embarking on his planned journey to Madagascar to deliver the drug consignment.
He however said that upon arrival in Madagascar, he was denied entry by Immigration authorities.
As a result, his friend and sponsor, Ozor Igo, based in Uganda, rerouted his flight to Lagos, where he was eventually arrested by NDLEA officers.
The suspect was unable to state the exact number of pellets he had ingested in Uganda and as a result, he was placed under excretion observation for a period of three days.
Between the date of his arrest and July 1, he was able to excrete 13 pellets in addition to the initial 87 wraps recovered from him, bringing the total number to 100 wraps of methamphetamine with a gross weight of 1.715 kilograms.
At the Apapa seaport in Lagos, a total of 8,287 nylon bags of Canadian Loud weighing 4,143.5 kilograms worth over N10.3 billion in street value were discovered in a container imported from Canada during a joint examination of the shipment by NDLEA officers, Customs personnel, and other security agencies on July 10, 2026.
The discovery followed weeks of targeted tracking and monitoring of the shipment since its departure from Montreal, Canada by operatives of the Maritime Intelligence Unit of NDLEA in close collaboration with the Apapa Strategic Command of the Agency.
Meanwhile, an attempt to export a 2.5kg skunk, a strain of cannabis, concealed in a gas compressor going to Cyprus through a courier company in Lagos has been thwarted by NDLEA operatives of the Directorate of Operation and General Investigation (DOGI).
With the same zeal, Commands and formations of the Agency across the country continued their War Against Drug Abuse (WADA) sensitisation activities in schools, worship centres, work places, and communities among others in the past week.
These included WADA enlightenment lecture for students and staff of Nnodo Secondary School, Abakaliki, Ebonyi State; Government Girls Secondary School, Sabon Gida, Sharada, Kano State; Royal Jesuit College, Agbado Ekiti, Ekiti State; and Community Secondary School, Idofa, Ogun State, while the leadership of Zone 14 Command of the NDLEA paid a WADA advocacy visit to the Rivers State Governor, Sir Siminalayi Fubara, at the Government House, Port Harcourt.
While commending the officers and men of DOGI, MMIA, NAIA, MIU, and, Apapa Commands of the Agency for the arrests and seizures, the Chairman/Chief Executive Officer of the NDLEA, retired Brigadier General Mohamed Buba Marwa, noted that their drug supply reduction efforts balanced with WADA sensitisation activities while he charged them and their compatriots across the country not to rest on their past laurels.
