GHANA TO UK: THE NEW TRAIL OF MISERY

Dan McDougall In Prampram, West Africa, Investigates How Cartels Get
Drugs From Colombia To Europe By Recruiting Vulnerable Teenagers

THE condoms are smeared in margarine or local vegetable oil, 'to help
them slip down', says Kawko, holding out the white grains of pure
cocaine in his scarred palm. Behind him, on the palm-tree fringed
beach of Prampram village, dozens of colourfully painted longboats
make land; the bulky wooden vessels heaved and roped out of the
roaring West Atlantic by slender teenage boys. 'There are many other
couriers here in Ghana; some have made a dozen journeys to London and
Amsterdam. You can see the benefit it has brought to their families,
even here in our village. Their mothers have stopped working; some
have motorbikes and have bought fishing boats. Some have also died. A
schoolfriend of mine swallowed over 50 condoms and died within an
hour. He dipped the condoms in honey and they ruptured. He was
foolish; the condoms were local, not imported.' Kawko gestures to
where his youngest son is playing in the sea with a yellow plastic
oil drum. 'I wouldn't want this life for him.'

Over the past few years a concerted shift in trafficking routes has
transformed West African countries like Ghana, Senegal and Guinea
Bissau into volatile hubs for cocaine smuggled from South America to
a booming European market. Using sophisticated transportation
networks and the latest communication technology to elude woefully
inept coastguards, Colombian traffickers are establishing transit
areas along the Gulf of Guinea that can only worsen lawlessness in
countries already overwhelmed by crime, poverty and instability.

For locals the route opens up a risky but tempting way out of
poverty. A single flight to Amsterdam from Ghana, via Morocco,
earlier this year carried 32 West Africans, all of whom had swallowed
cocaine packets or concealed them in their luggage. Impatient with
the increasing arrest rates of mules, the South American cartels have
recruited London-based Nigerians and Ghanaians to scour Britain's
capital for gullible teenage drug couriers.

Last week two teenagers were seized at Accra airport, en route for
London Gatwick. The 16- and 19-year-olds, both Lithuanian boys living
in south London, were arrested under the British-led Operation
Westbridge, a joint project by HM Revenue & Customs iand the Ghanaian
authorities to catch drug smugglers using Accra as a gateway to the
UK. The pair were allegedly caught with nearly four kilos of cocaine
ingested in around 16 condoms.

It came after July's seizure of 16-year-old London schoolgirls
Yasemin Vatansever and Yutunde Diya, who were stopped leaving the
country allegedly carrying UKP300,000 of cocaine hidden in laptop
bags. A narcotics officer who interrogated the girls claimed the
teenagers knew exactly what they were coming to do in Ghana. They
were, he claimed, 'classic mules' recruited in London to come to
Ghana and pick up the bags for a fee of UKP3,000. Up to 60 mules a
week are estimated to arrive in Britain from the region.

The rain falls heavily on the bumpy road to Kumasi, churning it to
red slushy mud. Here, 50km from the Ghanaian capital, Accra, is
Nswana Prison. For its two recent occupants, Vatansever and Diya, the
international fight against South American drug cartels is of little
concern. The girls, who had told their parents they were going on a
school trip to France before flying to Ghana, fit the classic drug
mule profile - young, poor and gullible. They have spent most of
their time in isolation. In the past fortnight Vatansever is believed
to have contracted malaria.

Conditions inside the high-walled compound are grim. Each day the
inmates are employed in hard labour, building an irrigation plant.
The cramped cells often fit as many as a dozen prisoners, who share
toilet facilities. Disease and violence are rampant. For the past few
days, officials have been temporarily holding the teenagers at
Ghana's Narcotics Control Board, on the top floor of the innocuous
office block. After reaching the floor where the girls were held, The
Observer was turned back by a machine-gun toting guard. The girls, he
said, were well. We heard them shouting from their makeshift cells.

The trial of the British schoolgirls will resume in Ghana this week
and both are expected to be sentenced to up to five years in prison.
They are being tried under Ghana's Juvenile Justice Act, meaning that
their trial must be completed within six months and they can only be
held on remand for three months.

The girls 'vigorously deny' the charges, according to Fair Trials
Abroad, which helped to find lawyers for the pair and has been
liaising with the families and the Foreign Office.

Fair Trials Abroad lawyer Stephen Jakobi, says the case bears
striking similarities to that of two Birmingham teenagers who were
jailed in Thailand after being found with UKP4m worth of heroin.
Karyn Smith, 18, and 17-year-old Patricia Cahill spent three years in
the infamous 'Bangkok Hilton' prison before being pardoned in 1993.
They claimed they were forced to confess by Thai police, who planted
drugs on them to claim reward money.

Jakobi said: 'You've got two very young girls going through an
airport where they were bound to get caught. There are lots of
parallels, and it seems to me extremely probable that these girls
were being used as decoys. As there were British officers involved in
their arrest it would have made sense to allow them through to
Britain and arrest them there, not leave them in Ghana.'

Almost all of the Ghana-based mules used by drugs gangs are poor and
willing to risk not only their liberty but their lives for less than
UKP500. The mules are all paid an initial fee, sometimes as low as
UKP50, with the rest payable upon a successful handover. If they are
arrested, they will not get paid and the debts they left behind will
be passed on to family members.

According to Tony Walker, Revenue & Customs head of operations, the
region is of increasing concern to the British authorities. 'The air
courier route from West Africa, either directly to the UK or in
transit through other EU airports, is a specific threat,' he said.
'The use of such young people in smuggling drugs demonstrates the
ruthless nature of those criminal gangs involved in the illegal
narcotics trade and the misery they cause.'

As well as providing a number of British undercover operatives on the
ground Operation Westbridge has supplied technical and operational
expertise to the Ghanaians. Since November 2006, Westbridge has made
122 interceptions, seizing 356kg of cocaine, 2,275kg of cannabis and
1.3kg of heroin. It follows the success of Operation Airbridge, a
joint UK-Jamaican initiative to catch drugs couriers with internal
concealments before they board planes from Jamaica.

But there are fears that without the full-time aid of a British task
force, local authorities will be unable to cope: 'The British have
only left a small team behind,' one Ghanaian Customs Office said: 'We
have some equipment on loan but our surveillance experience is
minimal. We don't have sniffer dogs, we don't have enough scanners;
it is all about profiling and gathering intelligence and we need the
British to attain that, not just temporary assistance.'.'

Harvested in the foothills of the Andes in Colombia, Peru or Ecuador
by cartels, the leaves of the coca plant are processed in
laboratories using kerosene, methyl alcohol and sulphuric acid. The
resulting powder is dried, cut into blocks and transferred to ports
in Colombia and Venezuela, routinely these days, for shipment to West
Africa. The cocaine is then cut into smaller amounts and sent on to Europe.

The US is the world's top market for cocaine, but use there is
declining. In Europe, demand is rising. A kilo of cocaine brings
about UKP25,000 in Europe, compared with about half that in the US.
London has become the centre of Europe's market. Not surprisingly the
smuggling routes are as complex as they are diverse.

In April this year eight European nations, led by Britain, launched a
military-law enforcement task force targeting cocaine traffic from
Africa. The Maritime Analysis Operations Centre, based in Lisbon,
teams police, navy and customs resources from across Europe, a model
similar to Florida's Drug Enforcement Agency.

Because of historic ties to Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula
remains a key gateway, with around 30 per cent of Britain's cocaine
coming in through Spanish corridors. The drugs are stockpiled in West
Africa and then moved to clandestine landing zones on the coasts of
Spain and Portugal, or commercial ports such as Barcelona and Antwerp
before reaching London in fishing vessels and commercial ship containers.

In September, the US DEA tipped off the Spanish coastguard to a ship
from Venezuela hauling 15 tonnes of cocaine. The ship off-loaded four
tonnes to a smaller vessel in the Atlantic. Spanish authorities
intercepted the smaller load near Ibiza, where the cocaine had been
transferred to fast boats operated by Bulgarians and Croatians. The
Spaniards then caught up with the mother ship heading for Ghana.

Of particular concern to the DEA are Ghana and Guinea-Bissau. In
Ghana, top officials were accused last year of protecting a
Venezuelan drug lord. Ghanaian police recorded the continent's
biggest cocaine bust last year, arresting Ghanaian and Nigerian
suspects in a Mercedes van containing two tons of the drug concealed
in boxes of fish.

Fronted by Colombian cartels, local gangsters in the region have even
set up elaborate front companies which allegedly buy high-level
protection for the business interests of their new South American
partners. Most aren't difficult to spot. In Accra, Ghana's capital,
BMWs, Mercedes and newly imported canary yellow Humvees stand out
from the beaten and battered local taxis.

As an example of how high up the lure of drugs money reaches you only
need look at the recent case of the Ghanaian MP Eric Amoateng. While
serving in parliament, Amoateng sent 70kg of heroin, hidden in boxes
of pottery, to the US and was arrested in January 2006 when he
arrived at New York's JFK airport to collect it.

Narcotics seizures in West Africa jumped eightfold in 2006, according
to the latest Europol statistics. But it said in a report last year
that 'only a very small proportion of the cocaine passing through the
continent is actually being seized'. Experts worry that traffickers
could eventually smuggle in precursor chemicals and set up labs,
enabling them to ship coca base across the Atlantic instead of the
more expensive finished product.

At a recent major seminar on narcotics, attended by some of the
world's leading law enforcement experts, the connection between West
Africa and the scourge of drugs in Europe was spelled out.

One of the speakers, Karen Tandy, head of the DEA, said: 'Latin
American gangs are setting up shop in Ghana, Nigeria, Guinea-Bissau
in the West and Kenya in the East. Africa has emerged as a real
hotspot in just the past couple of years. Africa will become, in
terms of a drugs hot-bed, one of our worst nightmares if we do not
get ahead of that curve now.'