The Guinean navy seized more than 1.5 tons of cocaine on Sunday from a ship flying the Sierra Leonean flag, the Guinean army said Wednesday in a statement.
Sixty-two bags of 25kg of cocaine each and another of 22kg were found in the hold of the vessel boarded by the army during one of its permanent surveillance missions of the Guinean maritime territory.
The ship’s crew is composed of four Sierra Leoneans, three Ghanaians, and three Guineans, according to the army’s information and public relations department.
The Minister of National Defense officially handed over the 1,572 kilograms of cocaine and the 10 crew members of the ship to the prosecutor of the Court of First Instance in Kaloum, Conakry, the statement added, noting that investigations are ongoing.
Long considered a simple transit zone, West and Central Africa has also become a region of high drug consumption, according to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) published in June 2022.
The UNODC says that between 2019 and 2022, at least 57 tons of cocaine were seized in or en route to West Africa, mainly in Cape Verde (16.6 tons), Senegal (4.7 tons), and Benin (3.9 tons), the report said.
