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Police deported 30 foreign students linked to drug trafficking – Matiang’i

By STELLA CHERONO November 27th, 2017 2 min read

Kenya last year deported 30 drug peddlers, who posed as students in various universities, Interior Acting Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang’i has said.

The CS admitted that drug suppliers and smugglers sometimes outwit law enforcement officers because they have devised numerous strategies to smuggle the substances into Kenya.

“They have experimented in the manufacture of synthetic drugs such as Amphetamine-type stimulants and new psychoactive substances, which have proved to be more fatal than traditional substances because their composition is unknown,” Mr Matiang’i said.

He spoke at the Windsor Hotel, where he officially opened the Inter-regional Conference on addressing and countering the drug problem.

The conference, organised by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), brings together delegates from 13 countries to exchange experiences and best practices.

MONEY LAUNDERING

Mr Matiang’i said the war on drugs is complicated because there exists a nexus between the crime, corruption and other forms of organised crimes such as terrorism, money laundering, human trafficking and firearms trafficking.

“Kenya, like many other countries, face these challenges due to porous borders which are used for the flow,” Mr Matiang’i said.

A total of 8,645kg of cannabis, commonly known as bhang, was seized in Kenya in 2016.

In the same year, 21.7kg of heroin was seized. The highest heroin seizure was in 2014, following the capture and destruction of a ship found in the Kenyan Coast with 377.244kg of the drug.

DRUG SEIZURES

Trafficking in cocaine, Mr Matiang’i said, had increased, as portrayed by the seizures within the last three years.

“In 2014, cocaine seizure was at 11.30kg, 5.96kg in 2015 and 106.3kg in 2016. This is similar to the trafficking of Methamphetamine that has risen to 3kg in 2015 to 8.9 in 2016,” he said.

UNODC’s World Drug Report of 2017 indicates that the estimated number of people using drugs has steadily increased over the last 20 years. In 2006, the estimated number of drug users was 208 million and it increased to 255 million in 2015.