Police arrest three women drug traffickers

By CYRUS OMBATI

Three women, one of them pregnant, were arrested after being found with more than 52 pellets of heroin and 18 of cocaine in Nairobi's Kilimani area.

The women were found in a guesthouse in Riara area consuming some of the drugs and stuffing others into their bags in readiness to travel to Jarkata, Indonesia on Friday night.

Close to Sh800,000 in US dollars was also recovered from one of the suspects’ houses.

Police said one of the suspects, a courier, had swallowed 40 pellets of the drugs and was to leave for the airport when they were ambushed.

Among those in custody is a woman identified as Scola Namunyu Mwangi, 41, a businesswoman who was arrested last year with a similar haul that had been disguised as jackets at the airport in Nairobi.

She is out on bond as her case proceeds in court. Police said the courier woman who had swallowed the pellets was yesterday still emitting them at JKIA police cells and that she is related to a notorious Nigerian drug trafficker.

The other pregnant woman was meant to deliver another haul of the drugs to unknown destination in the city, police said.

After the arrests, they were later taken to Lavington West estate where detectives from the anti-narcotics and the Special Crimes Prevention units seized more of the drugs.

Police said they were looking for more of the drugs, which they learnt had found their way into the country through Uganda despite the campaigns against the same.

"These are people operating under much secrecy but we are determined to get to the bottom of this," said head of SCPU John Koki.

Detectives handling the case said the Nigerian national who is still in Kenya is being sought after the women named him as the main suspect.

By Sunday, the woman who had swallowed the pellet had emitted 52 of them (with estimnated value of Sh250,000) and she was still in the process of removing more.

Scola was arrested at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport last year as she collected a consignment of heroin packaged as leather jackets. She had arrived at the airport to collect the consignment from Tehran, Iran, when anti-narcotics detectives arrested her.

The 45 jackets that contained the drug were part of a bigger consignment of the narcotics that was to pass through Kenya to other parts of Europe, whose value they estimated to be Sh80 million.