Sierra Leone: The cocaine trail
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Hello and welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Ed Butler and today we're on the trail of a wanted drugs kingpin from the Netherlands. The extraordinary rise and mystery surrounding Jos Leideckers.
Lydekers is a significant trafficker in the global cocaine business. He has been convicted of several cocaine trafficking charges in both the Netherlands and Belgium.
He's been filmed and repeatedly identified in the capital of a West African country, Sierra Leone. But what's the government doing about it?
He visits the president's daughter. They also like to go out together. So the authorities said, we don't know him, but local people tell us we know he's connected to the president.
Tracking one of Europe's top drugs fugitives. That's all to come on this edition of The Documentary.
May 1st this year, and the head of the Spanish Coast Guard's anti-drug operation, Lieutenant Colonel Oscar Ramacha, receives a tip-off. A cargo boat, the Arconian, is travelling across the Atlantic. It's about to transfer a large shipment of cocaine, he's been told, to smaller speedboats off the southern coast of Spain.
We knew six fast boats were to introduce this cocaine through the coast of Spain, Huelva and Cádiz.
So the cocaine was heading for the Spanish market, you think?
Some part is for the Spanish market, but other part is spread through the European countries and also other countries from Asia or wherever.
Customs officers board the ship. What they found was no ordinary haul. Some 30 tonnes of cocaine packaged in plain view along a corridor running from bow to stern. It was the biggest seaborne seizure of cocaine ever made. 22 crew members from Europe, Africa and Suriname were arrested, but the suspected mastermind behind the shipment, a Dutch drug dealer called Jos Leidikers, who's based in Sierra Leone... Well, he remained at large. How do you know this has come from Jos Leideckers?
One is the origin of the ship who started his trip from Sierra Leone. He controls all the cocaine that goes from Sierra Leone to other parts of the world. And we have also more information that he's receiving the cocaine from Suriname. He is putting it in big warehouses. He's the number one for us.
Would you say he is the most important figure in the West African trade coming to Europe?
Of course. He's the boss in Sierra Leone, but he's also, as an octopus, he has his fingers in other parts of the world.
This massive cocaine seizure from West Africa may only be the tip of the iceberg. Lucia Bird runs the Observatory of Illicit Economies in West Africa at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. She says the region has become central for meeting Europe's hungry appetite for cocaine.
We have many indicators from seizures to increasing local consumption and decreasing retail prices that really point to a surge in the volume of cocaine that is being moved through West Africa towards Europe. And West Africa is not just a transit zone. It's really a logistics hub where cocaine is imported, it's amalgamated or cut up and then redistributed through the best channels to Europe. And trafficking cocaine through West Africa has allowed trafficking networks to sidestep some of the increased scrutiny that trade flows from Latin America were experiencing coming into Europe.
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