Author name: skortimai

MONROVIA – Two weeks after customs officers at Roberts International Airport intercepted 237.6 kilograms of cocaine valued at US$19.2 million, the most damaging breach in the case is no longer at the airport. It is online. Someone with access to the investigation is recording, copying and feeding its evidence to the public, piece by piece, before prosecutors can introduce a single item in court. The pattern is too consistent to be accidental. It is hollowing out the case from the inside. Following the seizure, President Joseph Nyuma Boakai directed the formation of a Joint National Security Investigative Task Force comprising the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency (LDEA), Liberia National Police, National Security Agency, Executive Protection Service, Financial Intelligence Agency, Liberia Immigration Service, Customs Authorities, Airport Security and the Ministry of Justice. However, leaks arrived in waves, each one carrying material that should never have left a secure file. On June 15, the online outlet Verity News published high-resolution images of a Lufthansa Cargo air waybill, tracking screenshots, and a delivery record documenting a separate 100-kilogram shipment, worth roughly US$8 million, that left Monrovia weeks before the June 8 bust. The waybill, numbered 020 07366914, named shipper “Emre Venn Group” of Monrovia and consignee “Usman Ali” in the United Kingdom, and recorded four pieces totaling 100 kilograms moving on flight SN0241 from Monrovia to Brussels on May 22. The documents are not forgeries. They match official flight data exactly, which is precisely the problem. Records that authentic could only have come from inside the airline, the airport or the investigation itself. The visual evidence followed the same route to the public. A surveillance clip circulating on Facebook and Instagram shows four sealed crates marked “TNI” being loaded onto Brussels Airlines flight SN241 on May 22, with the timestamp and labeling matching the very shipment Verity documented. Flight logs confirm SN241 departed Monrovia at about 9:06 p.m. that night. There is no visible sign that the footage was edited. Its journey from a restricted CCTV system to a social media feed is not, and it points to a leak from within RIA security or an agency with access to it. These leakages reflect either a systemic failure of insider controls or a deliberate effort by parties who want this case shaped in public before it is shaped in court. On June 17, Justice Minister and Attorney General Cllr. Oswald Tweh Sr. told the House of Representatives the government would close its information further still. “We will never give out any more information,” Tweh said, citing Liberia’s limited investigative capacity and a need to protect intelligence shared by international partners. Yet even as the state pledged secrecy, the most sensitive contents of the file were already public. The official posture of silence and the reality of a porous evidence chain cannot both hold. One of them is failing, and it is not the leakers. That same hearing exposed how little the public can yet trust the official account. Tweh told lawmakers, “No one has been arrested. There are only people of interest who have been invited for questioning and investigation,” a statement at odds with LDEA Officer in Charge Fitzgerald T.M. Biago, who had reportedly told an earlier Ministry of Information briefing that six people were arrested. Pressed by lawmakers, Tweh conceded the larger danger. “We can assume that there is a drug cartel in Liberia,” he said. When Margibi County District No. 3 Representative Ellen A. Attoh-Wreh asked whether Emmanuel Zeon, reportedly tied to moving the cargo, was alive, Tweh answered, “We don’t know whether Emmanuel Zeon is dead or alive.” Every item that surfaces on social media before it surfaces in court weakens the chain of custody that any prosecution depends on. Defense lawyers will argue that footage and documents passed through private hands could have been altered, and prosecutors will now have to prove, item by item, how each original was obtained and preserved against versions already loose online. This is the kind of gap that collapses cases. On June 19, the Witness Protection Agency condemned the public exposure of cooperating witnesses, warning that revealing their identities is “unlawful and dangerous” and jeopardizes ongoing operations. By then the name of RIA Security Manager Oscar Brown had already circulated in connection with the case, alongside images. The question the seizure first raised was how 237.6 kilograms of cocaine moved through a national airport. The question now is who keeps opening the file. Until the government identifies the source of these leaks and seals the breach, every fresh disclosure will read less as transparency than as sabotage, and the people undermining the investigation will keep doing it in plain sight, one upload at a time.