Egyptian, Ethiopian airlines running drug cartels in our airports- Abike Dabiri

The senior special assistant to the President on diaspora matters, Abike Dabiri-Erewa on Wednesday accused Ethiopian and Egyptian Airlines of running drug cartels in airports across the country.

According to her, some of the airlines work with drug syndicates to put drugs in the bags of unsuspecting passengers.

She made the allegation during her appearance before senate ad-hoc committee investigating the circumstances leading to the arrest of Zainab Aliyu, a Nigerian student, in Saudi Arabia over alleged drug trafficking.

“We have other foreign and local airlines operating at our airports. But Egyptian and Ethiopian Airlines have drug cartels operating at our international airports.”

“They operate alongside local collaborators. It is not Air Peace, not Arik Air, but Egyptian and Ethiopian Airlines”.

In his own testimony, El-Yakub Lamir, airport chief of security at the Federal Airport Authority (FAAN), revealed that scanners at the Aminu Kano International Airport, Kano, where Aliyu was implicated, were not configured to detect drugs.

Also answering questions on security at the airports, Mustapha Abdallah, chairman of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), decried the lack of enough German trained sniffer dogs for their operations.

He said, “Throughout the federation, NDLEA only has 14 sniffer dogs stationed in Lagos and we don’t even have one to detect drugs at the Aminu Kano International Airport at all.”