Operatives of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) have apprehended a 41-year-old Canadian woman, Adrienne Munju, at Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA) in Ikeja, Lagos.
The arrest occurred on Thursday, October 3, 2024, when Munju was found to be smuggling a large consignment of ‘Canadian Loud,’ a potent strain of synthetic cannabis.
The NDLEA spokesperson, Femi Babafemi, disclosed the details in a statement on Sunday. According to him, Munju was intercepted during an inward clearance of passengers on a KLM flight from Canada at Terminal 1 of the Lagos airport. A joint inspection of her luggage revealed 74 parcels of the illicit drug, weighing a total of 35.20 kilograms, hidden in two of her three bags.
Munju, a first-time visitor to Nigeria, confessed that she had been recruited via an online platform to smuggle the drugs for a payment of 10,000 Canadian dollars. She explained that she accepted the offer to cover her ongoing master’s degree tuition in Canada.
In a separate operation, NDLEA officers at the Port Harcourt Ports in Onne, Rivers State, intercepted a massive shipment of opioids. The seizure, which included 13,298,000 pills of drugs such as Tramadol, Tramaking, Tamol-X, Royal Tapentadol, and Carisoprodol, along with 338,253 bottles of codeine-based cough syrup, was valued at over ₦9 billion.
The illicit substances were discovered in three containers originating from India during a joint cargo inspection with Nigerian Customs and other stakeholders on October 2 and 3, 2024.
