A 36-year-old woman was over the weekend arrested at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport for attempting to smuggle four kilograms of marijuana to Sharja, UAE.
On June 23, Anti Narcotics police noticed the packages of dried plant materials, encased in aluminium foil, in her suitcase while she was getting ready to board an Air Arabia flight.
According to police, the narcotics were valued at Sh1 million and are highly sought after in Dubai.
The airport has been implementing a range of precautions, including stringent screening processes, leading to an increase in drug-related seizures.
On the same day, a Thai woman was arrested at the airport in possession of three kilograms of cocaine worth approximately Sh18 million.
She was preparing to take a Qatar airline flight to Singapore via Doha when the police discovered the suitcase with two packets of whitish powder, which was afterwards identified as cocaine.
At the time of the seizure, the powder had been concealed in the bottom of the suitcase.
The head of the Anti Narcotics Unit (ANU) Margret Karanja recently announced the latest confiscation of narcotics in Kenya, part of a new campaign against trafficking and consumption.
The seizure of the four kilograms of marijuana follows the arrest of seven individuals in Nairobi in possession of cocaine valued at sh96.3 million and 1.2 metric tons of ketamine valued at Sh25 million.
The drugs had been concealed as avocados and were being transported to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport ahead of their exportation to Singapore.
In 2019, the EU ambassador to Kenya, Simon Mordue, declared that Mombasa port was responsible for thirty per cent of the illegal heroin trafficked into the EU.
The majority of heroin in the country is from Afghanistan, while cocaine comes from South America. On June 20, a Kenyan woman who had departed from Nairobi was apprehended in India for smuggling cocaine in whiskey bottles, with an estimated value of Sh 14 million.
At the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, a customs official briefed the local media outlets on the arrest.
The woman had flown into the Asian country from Kenya with a stopover in Addis Ababa, according to officials.
Customs personnel explained that the person had a bag from a duty-free shop filled with three whiskey bottles, which contained 2.5 kilograms of cocaine.
