A Kenyan woman was arrested at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport for allegedly smuggling cocaine.
She was carrying 1.4 kilos of cocaine valued at about Sh8 million when she was intercepted, police said.
In Kenya, a kilo of cocaine fetches between Sh4 million and Sh5 million while in international market it can go as far as Sh12 million, police say. It also depends on the market and demand.
The Kenyan national, who travelled via a Kenya airways flight from Nairobi to Mumbai on December 28, Thursday, was apprehended by Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) officers.
“The ingenious concealment of the drugs involved two black polythene packets cleverly placed within a hair conditioner bottle and a body wash bottle,” it stated.
The passenger was arrested under the provisions of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act of 1985 and subsequently remanded to judicial custody.
The DRI officers said they recovered 1490 grams of white powdery substance purported to be cocaine from the woman’s luggage.
Several Kenyans in 2023 were arrested in drug-related cases in foreign countries. .
For example, in June this year, Indian officials arrested a Kenyan woman who smuggled 2.5 kilograms of cocaine at the New Delhi airport via Addis Ababa, with the substance in whisky bottles.
On September 24, a Kenyan car dealer was arrested in Sri Lanka, at the Bandaranaike International Airport with 4 kilograms of cocaine estimated worth Sh24 million.
Detectives in Kenya said the latest trend of seizures of the narcotics locally point to a dangerous scenario that needs attention from authorities. In 2019, then European Union Ambassador to Kenya Simon Mordue said the Kenyan port of Mombasa accounted for 30 per cent of illegal heroin smuggled into the EU market.
