The Venezuela - West Africa Trafficking Network

TIMBUKTU, Mali - In early 2008, an official at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent a report to his superiors detailing what he called "the most significant development in the criminal exploitation of aircraft since 9/11."

The document warned that a growing fleet of rogue jet aircraft was regularly crisscrossing the Atlantic Ocean. On one end of the air route, it said, are cocaine-producing areas in the Andes controlled by the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. On the other are some of West Africa's most unstable countries.

The report, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, was ignored, and the problem has since escalated into what security officials in several countries describe as a global security threat.

The clandestine fleet has grown to include twin-engine turboprops, executive jets and retired Boeing 727s that are flying multi-ton loads of cocaine and possibly weapons to an area in Africa where factions of al-Qaida are believed to be facilitating the smuggling of drugs to Europe, the officials say.

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has been held responsible for car and suicide bombings in Algeria and Mauritania.

Gunmen and bandits with links to AQIM have also stepped up kidnappings of Europeans for ransom, who are then passed on to AQIM factions seeking ransom payments.
The aircraft hopscotch across South American countries, picking up tons of cocaine and jet fuel, officials say.
They then soar across the Atlantic to West Africa and the Sahel, where the drugs are funneled across the Sahara Desert and into Europe.

Transporting 'other goods'?An examination of documents and interviews with officials in the United States and three West African nations suggest that at least 10 aircraft have been discovered using this air route since 2006.

Officials warn that many of these aircraft were detected purely by chance. They caution that the real number involved in the networks is likely considerably higher.

Alexandre Schmidt, regional representative for West and Central Africa for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, cautioned in Dakar this week that the aviation network has expanded in the past 12 months and now likely includes several Boeing 727 aircraft.

"When you have this high capacity for transporting drugs into West Africa, this means that you have the capacity to transport as well other goods, so it is definitely a threat to security anywhere in the world," said Schmidt.

The "other goods" officials are most worried about are weapons that militant organizations can smuggle on the jet aircraft.A Boeing 727 can handle up to 10 tons of cargo.

The U.S. official who wrote the report for the Department of Homeland Security said the al-Qaida connection was unclear at the time.The official is a counter-narcotics aviation expert who asked to remain anonymous as he is not authorized to speak on the record. He said he was dismayed by the lack of attention to the matter since he wrote the report.

"You've got an established terrorist connection on this side of the Atlantic. Now on the Africa side you have the al-Qaida connection and it's extremely disturbing and a little bit mystifying that it's not one of the top priorities of the government," he said.

Since the September 11 attacks, the security system for passenger air traffic has been ratcheted up in the United States and throughout much of the rest of the world, with the latest measures imposed just weeks ago after a failed bomb attempt on a Detroit-bound plane on December 25.

"The bad guys have responded with their own aviation network that is out there everyday flying loads and moving contraband," said the official, "and the government seems to be oblivious to it."
The upshot, he said, is that militant organizations -- including groups like the FARC and al-Qaida -- have the "power to move people and material and contraband anywhere around the world with a couple of fuel stops."

The lucrative drug trade is already having a deleterious impact on West African nations. Local authorities told Reuters they are increasingly outgunned and unable to stop the smugglers.
And significantly, many experts say, the drug trafficking is bringing in huge revenues to groups that say they are part of al-Qaida.

It's swelling not just their coffers but also their ranks, they say, as drug money is becoming an effective recruiting tool in some of the world's most desperately poor regions. U.S. President Barack Obama has chided his intelligence officials for not pooling information "to connect those dots" to prevent threats from being realized.

But these dots, scattered across two continents like flaring traces on a radar screen, remain largely unconnected and the fleets themselves are still flying.

The deadly cocaine trade always follows the money, and its cash-flush traffickers seek out the routes that are the mostly lightly policed.

Beset by corruption and poverty, weak countries across West Africa have become staging platforms for transporting between 30 tons and 100 tons of cocaine each year that ends up in Europe, according to U.N. estimates.

Drug trafficking, though on a much smaller scale, has existed here and elsewhere on the continent since at least the late 1990s, according to local authorities and U.S. enforcement officials.

Earlier this decade, sea interdictions were stepped up. So smugglers developed an air fleet that is able to transport tons of cocaine from the Andes to African nations that include Mauritania, Mali, Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau.

What these countries have in common are numerous disused landing strips and makeshift runways -- most without radar or police presence. Guinea Bissau has no aviation radar at all. As fleets grew, so, too, did the drug trade.

The DEA says all aircraft seized in West Africa had departed Venezuela.

That nation's location on the Caribbean and Atlantic seaboard of South America makes it an ideal takeoff place for drug flights bound for Africa, they say.

In-flight refueling

A number of aircraft have been retrofitted with additional fuel tanks to allow in-flight refueling -- a technique innovated by Mexico's drug smugglers. (Cartel pilots there have been known to stretch an aircraft's flight range by putting a water mattress filled with aviation fuel in the cabin, then stacking cargoes of marijuana bundles on top to act as an improvised fuel pump.)

Ploys used by the cartel aviators to mask the flights include fraudulent pilot certificates, false registration documents and altered tail numbers to steer clear of law enforcement lookout lists,
investigators say.

Some aircraft have also been found without air-worthiness certificates or log books.
When smugglers are forced to abandon them, they torch them to destroy forensic and other evidence like serial numbers.

The evidence suggests that some Africa-bound cocaine jets also file a regional flight plan to avoid arousing suspicion from investigators.

They then subsequently change them at the last minute, confident that their switch will go undetected.

One Gulfstream II jet, waiting with its engines running to take on 2.3 tons of cocaine at Margarita Island in Venezuela, requested a last-minute flight plan change to war-ravaged Sierra Leone in West Africa.

It was nabbed moments later by Venezuelan troops, the report seen by Reuters showed. Once airborne, the planes soar to altitudes used by commercial jets.

They have little fear of interdiction as there is no long-range radar coverage over the Atlantic. Current detection efforts by U.S. authorities, using fixed radar and P3 aircraft, are limited to traditional Caribbean and north Atlantic air and marine transit corridors.

The aircraft land at airports, disused runways or improvised air strips in Africa. One bearing a false Red Cross emblem touched down without authorization onto an unlit strip at Lungi International Airport in Sierra Leone in 2008, according to a U.N. report.

Bribes

Late last year a Boeing 727 landed on an improvised runway using the hard-packed sand of a Tuareg camel caravan route in Mali, where local officials said smugglers offloaded between 2 and 10 tons of cocaine before dousing the jet with fuel and burning it after it failed to take off again.

For years, traffickers in Mexico have bribed officials to allow them to land and offload cocaine flights at commercial airports. That's now happening in Africa as well.

In July 2008, troops in coup-prone Guinea Bissau secured Bissau international airport to allow an unscheduled cocaine flight to land, according to Edmundo Mendes, a director with the Judicial Police.

When we got there, the soldiers were protecting the aircraft," said Mendes, who tried to nab the Gulfstream II jet packed with an estimated $50 million in cocaine but was blocked by the military."The soldiers verbally threatened us," he said. The cocaine was never recovered.

Just last week, Reuters photographed two aircraft at Osvaldo Vieira International Airport in Guinea Bissau -- one had been dispatched by traffickers from Senegal to try to repair the other, a Gulfstream II jet, after it developed mechanical problems. Police seized the second aircraft.

One of the clearest indications of how much this aviation network has advanced was the discovery, on November 2, of the burned out fuselage of an aging Boeing 727.

Local authorities found it resting on its side in rolling sands in Mali. In several ways, the use of such an aircraft marks a significant advance for smugglers.

Boeing jetliners, like the one discovered in Mali, can fly a cargo of several tons into remote areas.
They also require a three-man crew -- a pilot, co pilot and flight engineer, primarily to manage the complex fuel system dating from an era before automation.

Hundreds of miles to the west, in the sultry, former Portuguese colony of Guinea Bissau, national Interpol director Calvario Ahukharie said several abandoned airfields, including strips used at one time by the Portuguese military, had recently been restored by "drug mafias" for illicit flights.

"In the past, the planes coming from Latin America usually landed at Bissau airport," Ahukharie said as a generator churned the feeble air-conditioning in his office during one of the city's frequent blackouts.

"But now they land at airports in southern and eastern Bissau where the judicial police have no presence."

Ahukharie said drug flights are landing at Cacine, in eastern Bissau, and Bubaque in the Bijagos Archipelago, a chain of more than 80 islands off the Atlantic coast.

Devastating impact on Guinea Bissau

Interpol said it hears about the flights from locals, although they have been unable to seize aircraft, citing a lack of resources. The drug trade, by both air and sea, has already had a devastating impact on Guinea Bissau.

A dispute over trafficking has been linked to the assassination of the military chief of staff, General Batista Tagme Na Wai in 2009. Hours later, the country's president, Joao Bernardo Vieira, was hacked to death by machete in his home.

Asked how serious the issue of air trafficking remained for Guinea Bissau, Ahukharie was unambiguous: "The problem is grave." The situation is potentially worse in the Sahel-Sahara, where cocaine is arriving by the ton.

There it is fed into well-established overland trafficking routes across the Sahara where government influence is limited and where factions of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb have become increasingly active.

The group, previously known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, is raising millions of dollars from the kidnap of Europeans.

Analysts say militants strike deals of convenience with Tuareg rebels and smugglers of arms, cigarettes and drugs.

According to a growing pattern of evidence, the group may now be deriving hefty revenues from facilitating the smuggling of FARC-made cocaine to the shores of Europe.

Unholy allianceIn December, Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, told a special session of the UN Security Council that drugs were being traded by "terrorists and anti-government forces" to fund their operations from the Andes, to Asia and the African Sahel.

"In the past, trade across the Sahara was by caravans," he said. "Today it is larger in size, faster at delivery and more high-tech, as evidenced by the debris of a Boeing 727 found on November 2nd in the Gao region of Mali -- an area affected by insurgency and terrorism."

Just days later, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials arrested three West African men following a sting operation in Ghana. The men, all from Mali, were extradited to New York on December 16 on drug trafficking and terrorism charges.

Oumar Issa, Harouna Toure, and Idriss Abelrahman are accused of plotting to transport cocaine across Africa with the intent to support al-Qaida, its local affiliate AQIM and the FARC.

The charges provided evidence of what the DEA's top official in Colombia described to a Reuters reporter as "an unholy alliance between South American narco-terrorists and Islamic extremists."

Some experts are skeptical, however, that the men are any more than criminals. They questioned whether the drug dealers oversold their al-Qaida connections to get their hands on the cocaine.

In its criminal complaint, the DEA said Toure had led an armed group affiliated to al-Qaida that could move the cocaine from Ghana through North Africa to Spain for a fee of $2,000 per kilo for transportation and protection. Toure discussed two different overland routes with an undercover informant.

• One was through Algeria and Morocco;
• the other via Algeria to Libya.

He told the informer that the group had worked with al-Qaida to transport between one and two tons of hashish to Tunisia, as well as smuggle Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi migrants into Spain. In any event, AQIM has been gaining in notoriety.

Security analysts warn that cash stemming from the trans-Saharan coke trade could transform the organization -- a small, agile group whose southern-Sahel wing is estimated to number between 100 and 200 men -- into a more potent threat in the region that stretches from Mauritania to Niger.

It is an area with huge foreign investments in oil, mining and a possible trans-Sahara gas pipeline.

"These groups are going to have a lot more money than they've had before, and I think you are going to see them with much more sophisticated weapons," said Douglas Farah, a senior fellow at the International Assessment Strategy Center, a Washington based security think-tank.

The Timbuktu region covers more than a third of northern Mali, where the parched, scrubby Sahel shades into the endless, rolling dunes of the Sahara Desert. It is an area several times the size of Switzerland, much of it beyond state control. Moulaye Haidara, the customs official, said the sharp influx of cocaine by air has transformed the area into an "industrial depot" for cocaine.

Sitting in a cool, dark, mud-brick office building in the city where nomadic Tuareg mingle with Arabs and African Songhay, Fulani and Mande peoples, Haidara expresses alarm at the challenge local law enforcement faces. Using profits from the trade, the smugglers have already bought "automatic weapons, and they are very determined," Haidara said. He added that they "call themselves al-Qaida," though he believes the group had nothing to do with religion, but used it as "an ideological base." Local authorities say four-wheel-drive Toyota SUVs outfitted with GPS navigation equipment and satellite telephones are standard issue for smugglers.

Residents say traffickers deflate the tires to gain better traction on the loose Saharan sands, and can travel at speeds of up to 70 miles-per-hour in convoys along routes to North Africa.

Timbuktu governor, Colonel Mamadou Mangara, said he believes traffickers have air-conditioned tents that enable them to operate in areas of the Sahara where summer temperatures are so fierce that they "scorch your shoes."

He added that the army lacked such equipment. A growing number of people in the impoverished region, where transport by donkey cart and camel are still common, are being drawn to the trade.

They can earn 4 to 5 million CFA Francs (roughly $9-11,000) on just one coke run.
"Smuggling can be attractive to people here who can make only $100 or $200 a month," said Mohamed Ag Hamalek, a Tuareg tourist guide in Timbuktu, whose family until recently earned their keep hauling rock salt by camel train, using the stars to navigate the Sahara. Haidara described northern Mali as a no-go area for the customs service.

"There is now a red line across northern Mali, nobody can go there," he said, sketching a map of the country on a scrap of paper with a ballpoint pen. "If you go there with feeble means ... you don't come back."

Venezuela uncooperative

Speaking in Dakar this week, Schmidt, the U.N. official, said that growing clandestine air traffic required urgent action on the part of the international community. "This should be the highest concern for governments ... For West African countries, for West European countries, for Russia and the U.S., this should be very high on the agenda," he said.

Stopping the trade, as the traffickers are undoubtedly aware, is a huge challenge -- diplomatically, structurally and economically.

Venezuela, the takeoff or refueling point for aircraft making the trip, has a confrontational relationship with Colombia, where President Alvaro Uribe has focused on crushing the FARC's 45-year-old insurgency. The nation's leftist leader, Hugo Chavez, won't allow in the DEA to work in the country. In a measure of his hostility to Washington, he scrambled two F16 fighter jets last week to intercept an American P3 aircraft -- a plane used to seek out and track drug traffickers -- which he said had twice violated Venezuelan airspace.

He says the United States and Colombia are using anti-drug operations as a cover for a planned invasion of his oil-rich country. Washington and Bogota dismiss the allegation.

In terms of curbing trafficking, the DEA has by far the largest overseas presence of any U.S. federal law enforcement, with 83 offices in 62 countries. But it is spread thin in Africa where it has just four offices -- in Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and South Africa -- though there are plans to open a fifth office in Kenya.

Law enforcement agencies from Europe as well as Interpol are also at work to curb the trade. But locally, officials are quick to point out that Africa is losing the war on drugs.
The most glaring problem, as Mali's example shows, is a lack of resources.

The only arrests made in connection with the Boeing came days after it was found in the desert -- and those incarcerated turned out to be desert nomads cannibalizing the plane's aluminum skin, probably to make cooking pots.

They were soon released. Police in Guinea Bissau, meanwhile, told Reuters they have few guns, no money for gas for vehicles given by donor governments and no high security prison to hold criminals.

Corruption is also a problem. The army has freed several traffickers charged or detained by authorities seeking to tackle the problem, police and rights groups said.

Passengers, cargo 'come back on those planes'

Serious questions remain about why Malian authorities took so long to report the Boeing's discovery to the international law enforcement community. What is particularly worrying to U.S. interests is that the networks of aircraft are not just flying one way -- hauling coke to Africa from Latin America -- but are also flying back to the Americas.

The internal Department of Homeland Security memorandum reviewed by Reuters cited one instance in which an aircraft from Africa landed in Mexico with passengers and unexamined cargo.

The Gulfstream II jet arrived in Cancun, by way of Margarita Island, Venezuela, en route from Africa. The aircraft, which was on an aviation watch list, carried just two passengers.

• One was a U.S. national with no luggage, the other a citizen of the Republic of Congo with a diplomatic passport and a briefcase, which was not searched.

"The obvious huge concern is that you have a transportation system that is capable of transporting tons of cocaine from west to east," said the aviation specialist who wrote the Homeland Security report.

"But it's reckless to assume that nothing is coming back, and when there's terrorist organizations on either side of this pipeline, it should be a high priority to find out what is coming back on those airplanes."

The Rest @ MSNBC News

What Really Happened The Night Guinea-Bissau's President was Killed

Guinea Bissau: Double assassination


I was drinking a coffee at Baiana when the Afropop music played by the local radio suddenly stopped. A frantic speaker was trying to report about a blast that had just killed a few soldiers, destroying the military headquarters.

I jumped in my car and drove toward the military compound. When I arrived everyone was shouting and running through the smoky ruins of the building. Bissau’s only ambulance was coming and going from the hospital to pick up the bodies of the victims. Four heavily armed soldiers pointing their AK-47 at my face discouraged me from taking photographs or asking questions. All they told me was that General Batista Tagme Na Wai, head of the army, had just been assassinated. I went back to the car and headed to the hospital.

On this night last February Bissau’s sleepy routine was broken. I made some phone calls to find out what was going on, even as the Minister of Defense arrived at the hospital and ordered the police to keep journalists away. After two hours trying to get information I left the hospital, heading to my hotel. At the reception everyone was trading theories. Someone said it was a coup d’etat, others that it was an accident, a bomb, or the beginning of another civil war. I went to my room and tried to sleep.

At six in the morning my friend and informant Vladimir, a reliable security man who works at the hotel, knocked on my door. He was frightened, and told me that the president had just been killed. When I asked him how he knew, he simply shook his head. I instantly left my room and went to the President’s house. Soldiers there were shooting in the air, to keep a little crowd of people away from the house.

A bunch of soldiers with machine guns and bazookas surrounded the block. The president’s armored Hummer was still parked in front of the house, the tires flat and its bulletproof windows shattered. The police cars from his escort were destroyed. A rocket shot from a bazooka had penetrated four walls, ending up in the president’s living room. Joao Bernardo Vieira was dead, after ruling Guinea Bissau for nearly a quarter of a century.

After a few hours waiting in front of the house I understand I wouldn’t have been allowed any access this day. A soldier came toward me and seized my camera to check if I had taken any pictures. Fortunately I had not, and he gave me the camera back. It was time to leave.
In just nine hours Guinea Bissau had lost both it president and the head of its army. Why so much violence? Was this double assassination the result of an old rivalry between Vieira and Tagme, or was it something more?

The army’s spokesman, Zamora Induta, declared that the president had been killed by a group of renegade soldiers and that assailants using a bomb had assassinated General Tagme. He said there is no connection between the two deaths. Of course, nobody believed that this was so.

In the last few years Guinea Bissau had become a major hub for cocaine trafficking. The drug is shipped from Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil to West Africa en route to its final destination in Europe. Were these assassinations linked to drug trafficking?

After paying a useless visit to the president’s house, I headed back to the military headquarters, where the situation was still tense but the press was finally allowed in. I took some pictures of the destroyed building and sneaked out from the generals’ view, reaching a backyard where some soldiers were resting, sipping tea under a big tree. I joined them, trying to be friendly. I offered cigarettes and had tea in return, so we started to talk about what happened to General Tagme Na Wai and to President Vieira, when Paul -- the chief of a special commando unit from the region of Mansoa -- told me they had had a hell of night. He wore a denim cowboy hat and two cartridge belts across his body, in perfect Rambo style.

At first I thought he was referring to the general situation, but then he proudly told me that he and his men were sent to the president’s house, to kill him. It was noon, the sun higher than ever. My blood froze. My first reaction was actually not to react. I simply answered with a skeptical “really”, and let him talk.

“The President is responsible for his own death,” said Paul, in French.
“We went to the house, to question Nino (as the president was called) about the bomb that killed Tagme Na Wai. When we arrived he was trying to flee, with his wife, so we forced them to stay. When we asked if he issued the order to kill Tagme, he first denied his responsibility but then confessed. He said he bought the bomb during his last trip to France and ordered that it be placed under the staircase, by Tagme’s office. He didn’t want to give the names of those who brought the bomb here, or the name of the person who placed it.”

At this point, the quality of the details started to convince me that Paul wasn’t lying.
“You know, Nino was a brave man but this time he really did something wrong. So we had to kill him. After all, he killed Tagme and made our life impossible… we are not receiving our salary since six months ago."

“So, what happened after you questioned him” - I asked.
“Well, after that we shoot him and then we took his powers away. Nino was a dangerous man, a very powerful person”.

“And what about his wife?”

“She doesn’t have anything to do with that, so we didn’t have any reason to kill her. She was crying and she urinated in her own clothes, so after shooting Nino we took her out of the kitchen. We respect Nino’s wife. She’s a good woman.”

The whole tale was surrealistic and I didn’t quite understand what “taking his powers away” meant.

“Nino had some special powers…”, explains Paul, reflecting a strongly held local belief about the long-time ruler. “…We needed to make sure he won’t come back for revenge. So we hacked his body, with a machete; the hands, the arms, the legs, his belly and his head. Now he’s really dead”. Paul erupts in a smoky laugh, followed by his men.

I give a quick look to the soldiers’ uniforms, and I see that three of them have blood on their boots and pants. I keep on playing the part, and tell them I understand what they did. Then I ask for permission to make portraits of them, with my camera. After I took the picture, Paul led me into an abandoned corner of a warehouse, within the military compound.

“I have something you could buy, do you want to see?” He called one of his men who came with a black bag. “How much would you pay for that?” - he asked me, his eyes wide-open, as he showed me the president’s satellite phone, stolen from his house few hours before.

“Why should I buy a used satellite phone?,” I said, trying to show as little interest as possible. “I don’t know… what’s your price?”

It was clear that Paul didn’t have a clue. “…Nine thousand Euros, and it’s yours.” I laughed, and said I couldn’t afford that price. So I offered him one more cigarette, and I left.

I spent the next two hours thinking about all the information that was possibly stored in this device. The phone numbers and evidence that would possibly connect Guinea Bissau’s former president with some drug cartels in other countries.

I absolutely needed this phone, but didn’t want to show my interest. I went back to the military headquarters, with an excuse, when Paul spontaneously approached me again. He offered me the phone, once again, and told me I could make the price. I offered 300 Euros. I bought it for 600.

The next day, I managed to visit the president’s house with my camera. One of his several cousins gives me a tour. He led me to the kitchen first, to show me where Nino Vieira was executed. The blood was all over the room. The machete was still on the floor and the bulletproof vest he always wore was on the chair where his wife sat during the questioning. All around there were hundreds of bullets from AK-47 and machine guns. The soldiers looted and destroyed the house. They took everything they could, including clothes and food.

Nino Vieira’s and Tagme Na Wai’s brutal assassinations reflects much more than a mere confrontation between the Papel, the ethnic group to which the President belonged, and the Balanta, Tagme’s ethnic group. It certainly goes beyond the personal settling of accounts.
The spiral of violence began in November 2008, when the head of the navy, Rear Admiral Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, suddenly left Bissau, after the president accused him of plotting a coup d’etat. A month later, in December, the international press reported what appeared to be a “failed attempt at a coup d’etat”, made by 12 soldiers who attacked the presidential compound. But this failed coup was actually about something more.

According to Calvario Ahukharie, the incorruptible national director of Interpol and a crime expert, this escalation of violence is just one piece of a war to gain more control, and personal benefits, over drug trafficking. “The Army, the Navy and the President are all involved – Nino was number one and Tagme number two, and they were competing,” he told me. “Someone had to fall.”

by Marco Vernaschi

Learn more about this reporting project

The Rest @ The Pulitzer Center

Guinea Bissau Presindetial Candidate Baciro Dabo and other Killed in Coupt Attemp

Angola Radio reports that Guinea Bissau had anothother Coupt attempt on Friday, 5 June, 2009 as campaigning for the 28 June election began.Baciro Dabo, Presidentail Candidate adn MP Hélder Proença were among the killed.

-Shimron Issachar

AU considers crucial holding polls on scheduled date in Guinea Bissau Luanda - The African Union (AU) considers as imperative that the presidential election in Guinea-Bissau should be held on the scheduled date as the first step for stability and resolution of the crisis in that country.

This was said to the National Radio of Angola (RNA) by the AU’s special envoy to Guinea Bissau, the Angolan Joao Bernardo de Miranda.

The AU's special envoy was speaking in the light of the deaths of Guinea-Bissau’s former minister of Territorial Administration and candidate to the presidential election, Baciro Dabo, and the MP Hélder Proença, as well as two other people, for alleged involvement in an attempted coup d'état on Friday.

João Bernardo de Miranda said that Baciro Dabo, who died Friday, had expressed his concern about security like the other candidates. The special envoy seized the opportunity to launch an appeal to the international community to analyse calmly the chance to ensure the security of the populations, candidates and institutions. To him, this election is aimed at the normalisation and stability of the institutions of the state and it is the starting point which is extremely important to add other steps, namely the dialogue among Guineans and the necessary reforms that are needed. According to João Miranda, before getting to these last two steps, it is imperative to have a Head of State, therefore it is necessary the election of the president. The AU official said that he was informed that the National Elections Council of Guinea and the Supreme Court are going to meet to advise the interim president to take a position on the holding of the poll. According to the Guinean press, it is circulating in Bissau City a list with names of political leaders to be assassinated. However, the beginning of the campaign for the June 28 presidential election, in Guinea-Bissau, was postponed, according to the chairman of the National Electoral Commission, Desire Lima da Costa, “because there are no psychological conditions, or others”. The country will hold early elections following the assassination of President "Nino" Vieira last March 02, hours after the death of the staff chief of the Armed Forces, Tagmé In Waié.

The Rest @ Angola Press

Guinea-Bissau President and Army Commanders Assassinated

The president of Guinea-Bissau was assassinated Monday morning, a day after an explosion killed the head of the West African country's military, the prime minister said.

Circumstances of Joao Bernardo Vieira's death are unclear.

It was not immediately clear how President Joao Bernardo Vieira, 69, died. Prime Minister Carlos Gomes confirmed the death to CNN.

Early Monday, gunfire and rocket explosions that lasted for about an hour were heard near the presidential palace in the capital, Bissau, according to local media. Looting was later reported at the presidential palace.

Army spokesman Zamora Induta said an aide to the president was killed during the gunfire.
He added that the gunmen remained at-large and that a 10-member-commission will manage the army until a new chief of staff is named. The army, he said, will remain neutral.

Gen. Tagme Na Waie, chief of Guinea-Bissau's military, was killed in a bomb explosion in his office Sunday, according to local news reports. Five other high-ranking military officials were wounded, two of them critically.

After the attack, all local radio stations were ordered to immediately suspend their programs.
The United Nations said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed dismay over the killings.

"The secretary-general strongly condemns these violent acts, which have occurred soon after successful legislative elections which paved the way for enhanced U.N. support to the country's peace-building efforts," the statement said.

"The secretary-general calls urgently for calm and restraint, and urges the national authorities of Guinea-Bissau to fully investigate these assassinations and bring to justice those responsible for them."

The British government issued a statement advising against "all but essential travel" to the country.

Na Waie's predecessor also was assassinated. Soldiers shot and killed Gen. Verissimo Correia Seabra in October 2004.

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The Rest @ CNN

CNN's Umaro Djau contributed to this report.

Guinea-Bissau: Cassamma's Agunentas Fired Near Batista Tagme Na Wai

BISSAU (Reuters) - Guinea-Bissau's military said on Tuesday the armed forces chief had been fired on by militiamen hired to protect the president and ordered the militia to be disbanded.
But a presidential guard officer said the incident at midnight on Sunday was an accident and not an attempt to kill armed forces chief General Batista Tagme Na Wai.

The row over the shooting reflected tension between Na Wai, who has criticised some of President Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira's decisions and appointments, and Vieira, who survived an attack on his residence by renegade soldiers in November.

Since independence in 1974, the former Portuguese colony in West Africa has had a history of coups and military mutinies.

"At midnight on January 4 ... General Batista Tagme Na Wai was aimed at by a burst of gunfire fired by Aguentas militia mobilised and armed by Interior Minister Cipriano Cassama," the armed forces command said in a statement broadcast by state media. No injuries were reported from the incident.

A presidential guard officer said the AK-47 automatic rifle of one of Vieira's guard had gone off while General Na Wai and his escort were passing. "It wasn't an assassination attempt," adjutant Albino Bogra told reporters.

Guinea-Bissau, whose main export is cashew nuts, is among the poorest countries in the world. Its security has been threatened in recent years by Colombian cocaine cartels using its territory to smuggle drugs to Europe.

The interior ministry had recruited a 400-strong force of militia, known as Aguentas, to be Vieira's personal bodyguard after the president was the target of a machinegun and rocket-propelled grenade attack on his residence on November 23

The Rest @ All Africa.com

Six Guinea-Bissau Soldeirs Fail to Assissinate their President

President Joao Bernardo Vieira narrowly escaped by hiding in a room in his heavily fortified residence while security forces fought back, only managing to turn back the soldiers after a three-hour gunbattle....

(where was Batista Tagme Na Wai? He has now arresed a Navy Sergeant in an attempted to again implicate

-Shimron)

....On Monday, the president of the tiny West African country returned to work, meeting with diplomats and overseeing the creation of a commission that will investigate the attempted coup, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.

Col. Armando Nhaga confirmed that the arrested six soldiers were being questioned. Three others fled after the battle.

He said that among those still at large is Ntcham Yala, a navy sergeant who is believed to be close to the ousted head of the navy, Rear Adm. Bubo Na Tchuto.

Na Tchuto was placed under house arrest in August after being accused of attempting to orchestrate a coup. But he escaped six days later, fleeing by sea to neighboring Gambia, where he was briefly arrested and then released, Nhaga said.

Na Tchuto could not be located for comment Monday but he has previously denied involvement in the prior foiled coup.

• The U.N. says Guinea-Bissau is a key transit point for cocaine smuggled from Latin America to Europe.
• The government estimates that as much as 1,750 pounds of cocaine transits the country's borders each week, most of it flown in small planes from South America.
  U.N. drug officials believe the traffickers drop off the drugs on the uninhabited islands that dot the country's coastline.
• It's a territory that until August was under the control of Na Tchuto's navy.
  Sunday's attack came days after the government announced the provisional results of last week's parliamentary elections, which saw the party of former President Kumba Yala lose a fifth of its delegates.
• Yala rejected the results even though international observers deemed them legitimate.
  Since winning independence from Portugal in 1973, Guinea-Bissau has suffered multiple coups and a civil war.
• Vieira himself came to power in a 1980 coup, while Kumba Yala was deposed in one in 2003.

The Rest @ Africa AP

Posted to the web 23 November 2008

Soldiers attacked the residence of President João Bernardo Vieira of Guinea-Bissau in the early hours of Sunday in what appeared to be post-election instability, news agencies report.

• Reuters reported that Shola Omoregie, the United Nations Secretary-General's representative in Guinea-Bissau, said the president and his family had survived the attack but that "the situation is very serious."
• The agency quoted military chief General Batista Tagme Na Wai as saying five attackers had been arrested, "and the situation is under control.
• The Associated Press reported the interior minister, Cipriano Cassama, as saying one member of the presidential guard had been killed and several injured.
• The BBC's West Africa correspondent described the assault as an apparent attempt at a coup.
• Election officials announced on Friday that the former ruling party, PAIGC (the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, founded by Amílcar Cabral), had won parliamentary elections held on November 16.
• The recent breakdown of a stability pact had caused concern that the country was too unstable to hold elections.

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General Batista Tagme Na Wai Promises to Attack Traffickers

Keep an eye on General Batista Tagme Na Wai. The article that follows looks like the front-stage theatrical act to hide back-stage collusion. What did his financial transactions look like after his people began intimidating local police holding traffickers who were mysteriously released?

-Shimron

Guinea-Bissau's military will shoot down any aircraft that enters its airspace without permission as part of efforts to fight drug-trafficking by criminal gangs in the West African state, its top officer said.

Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Batista Tagme Na Wai promised a "crusade" against narcotics smuggling in the tiny, poor nation on the Atlantic coast, which experts say is used by drugs cartels as a staging post to smuggle cocaine to Europe.

Guinea-Bissau authorities say shipments of Colombian cocaine seized by local police have been flown in by small planes from Latin America to bush airstrips. The drugs are then flown or shipped out of the country to Europe by the traffickers.

• "We will shoot down every plane that tries to violate our air space without previous permission from the authorities," Na Wai told reporters late on Thursday.
• He added stores of aircraft fuel used by drugs smugglers had been found and seized.
• The general said anti-aircraft batteries had been installed in the offshore Bijagos islands
• The International Institute for Strategic Studies, which reports on the strength of armies around the world, lists the Guinea-Bissau military as possessing Russian-made anti-aircraft guns and SAM SA-7 ground-to-air missiles but it was not clear how many of these weapons were operational.
• Guinea-Bissau's government, police and military have faced international criticism for not doing enough to combat the cocaine trafficking, but they say they do not have enough equipment and technology and have demanded more foreign aid.
• In July, the country formally adopted the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime as part of its efforts to crack down against the traffickers.

The Rest @ Javno

Batista Tagme Na Wai How far up does the Coruption go?

It appears someone high on Batista Tagme Na Wai staff, or he himself, has been hired by drug traffickers for protection, check contacts with known FARC and/or Venezuelan connections.

-Shimron

Drug Trafficking Continued During Aleged Coup Attempt in Guinnea-Bissau

Last week Justice Minister Carmelita Pires said she had received death threats after a plane was seized carrying more than 500 kilos (1,100 pounds) of cocaine, according to police sources.

-AFP

Guinea-Bissau Continues to Destabilize

BISSAU (Reuters) - Military officers in Guinea-Bissau tried to stage a coup last week as the West African nation faced a political crisis, the armed forces spokesman said on Friday.

Lieutenant-Colonel Arsenio Balde said Rear-Admiral Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, the head of the navy, was in custody and other officers were being questioned about the attempt. He said the situation was under control.

"A military commission of inquiry has been set up and all those implicated in this attempted coup are being questioned to shed light on this affair," Balde told reporters in the capital Bissau. "We have Americo Bubo Na Tchuto in our hands," he said.

He said officers toured barracks in the West African country last week, trying to enlist support for military intervention to end a political crisis while Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Batista Tagme Na Wai was abroad.

• Na Tchuto's arrest on Wednesday added to a deepening political crisis in the former Portuguese colony, which has come under increasing diplomatic pressure to curb a booming international cocaine trade.
• Within the past week, President Joao Bernardo Vieira has dissolved parliament and appointed a new prime minister after the Supreme Court declared the lawmakers' mandate invalid and the opposition withdrew from the unity government.
• Legislative elections are not scheduled until November.
• Guinea-Bissau is no stranger to coups and instability, having been shaken by a series of crises since independence in 1974, but it is now under international scrutiny over its role in the multi-billion-dollar global cocaine trade.

Taking advantage of long, porous borders and poor policing, smugglers have turned Guinea-Bissau into a transit point for cocaine on its way from Latin America to Europe.
Some political analysts say local civilian and military authorities are complicit.

Last month, two planes were seized in Bissau. International drug experts were allowed on board one of them only after a standoff between two branches of the security services.

The plane was found to be empty but sniffer dogs confirmed it had carried cocaine. The head of the control tower was subsequently arrested and the deputy head of the air force is wanted for questioning, security sources said.

Drug experts have said the drugs trade and rivalry between factions involved in it risked aggravating instability in weak countries in West Africa.

Guinea-Bissau's northern neighbour Senegal said late on Thursday it had sent a minister to Bissau after Vieira spoke to Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade on the subject.

The Rest @ Reuters Africa

BISSAU, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Military officers in Guinea-Bissau tried to stage a coup while Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Batista Tagme Na Wai was abroad last week, Na Wai's spokesman said on Friday.
Lieutenant-Colonel Arsenio Balde said Rear-Admiral Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, the head of the Navy, was in custody and other officers were being questioned in connection with the "attempted coup". He said the situation was now under control. (Reporting by Alberto Dabo)

The Rest @ alertnet

Batista Tagme Na Wai continues Narco Intimidation In Guinea-Bissau

Keep an eye on Batista Tagme Na Wai General of Guinea-Bissau's Army.

• He Threatened and Intimidated the Guinea-Bissau National Chief of Police when she was holding drug cartel suspects, releasing them.
• The UN tried to Board a plane suspected of carrying drugs from Latin America, creating stand-off between the judicial police tasked with combating drugs crimes and military personnel who tried to prevent police boarding the aircraft.
• Now, Genral Batista Tagme Na Wai, "suspended and disarmed" The head of the Navy, (Rear-Admiral Jose) Americo Bubo Na Tchuto yesterday. (See below)

I suggest his contacts with South and Central American drug traffickers bear analysis.

-Shimron
see bellow
BISSAU, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Guinea-Bissau has suspended its navy chief in a further jolt to the country's establishment after the government and parliament were dissolved this week, an armed forces official and a security source said on Thursday.

President Joao Bernardo Vieira faces a constitutional crisis at the same time as the United Nations and Western donors are pressing for more decisive action to tackle Latin American gangs who smuggle cocaine via the country's shoreline and airstrips.

"The head of the Navy, (Rear-Admiral Jose) Americo Bubo Na Tchuto was suspended and disarmed yesterday by the head of the armed forces, General Batista Tagme Na Wai," said an official at the armed forces headquarters who declined to be named.

The official said Na Tchuto was under house arrest, which a United Nations official and a security source confirmed.

U.N. officials have piled pressure on Guinea-Bissau to combat drug smuggling since two planes suspected of being used by traffickers were seized at its main airport last month.

The seizures led to a stand-off between the judicial police tasked with combating drugs crimes and military personnel who tried to prevent police boarding the aircraft. No drugs were found but three Venezuelan nationals were arrested.

The airport's two senior air traffic control officials were also arrested, adding credence to suspicions among U.N. and international anti-drug enforcement officers that officials in Guinea-Bissau's establishment were involved in drug smuggling.

"Planes land and take off any old how...just as boats dock and leave again without the state authorities even being informed about it," Vieira said on Wednesday at the inauguration of new Prime Minister Carlos Correia.

Vieira appointed Correia, an old ally, to fill the power vacuum left when the Supreme Court ruled a law extending the assembly's mandate until elections in November was illegal.
That forced Vieira to dissolve parliament, effectively terminating the government's term of office too.

Na Tchuto's suspension is a new blow to stability in Guinea-Bissau, which has suffered a string of military coups and mutinies since it won independence in 1974 after a bitter and destructive war with colonial power Portugal.

The Rest @ Africa Reuters

West African Coastal Fishermen become Drug Mules

29th July, 2008

Fishermen in Africa are increasingly turning to drug and people trafficking to boost their meager incomes as fish stocks dry up.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has said:

• large boats are heading from Latin America to African islands, where drugs are transferred into many smaller fishing boats which proceed along the coast to unload their cargo in the Gambia, Senegal and Guinea-Conakry.
• Guinea Bissau has increasingly become a transit hub for organised criminal networks trafficking drugs from Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil through West Africa to Europe.
• The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has said several hundred kilograms of cocaine go through the area each week.
• The Bijagos archipelago is said to be an ideal place for landing large quantities of cocaine, due to its geographical configuration, which makes it easy for boats to travel without detection.
• Apart from the drug trade, local fishermen say while they run at a loss when fishing, they can earn up to US$720 for each person trafficked northwards toward Europe.

The Rest @ Albuquerque News
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Venezuelan Drug Planes Held in Guinnea Bissau

21 July 2008

BISSAU - Authorities in Guinea-Bissau are holding two planes that landed in the westAfrican country from Venezuela with more than 500 kilos (1,100 pounds) of cocaine aboard, police said Saturday.

The two twin-engined aircraft landed without authorisation at Bissau's airport last weekend.

The crew, said to be an unknown number of South Americans, subsequently fled, airport sources said.

The sources said the aircraft were found to be carrying 500 kilos and 15 kilos of cocaine respectively.

Police sources said a senior army officer was believed to be implicated in the racket but did not name him.
Guinea-Bissau, one of the poorest countries in Africa, has become a hub for drug smuggling from Latin America to Europe.

On Thursday a speedboat loaded with an estimated 700 kilos of cocaine docked at Quinhamel, 40 kilometres west of the capital, a police source said.

• Men in uniform had unloaded and taken it to Bissau without being challenged, he added.
• Earlier this month a senior police officer, Lucinda Barbosa Ahukarie, said that since 2006 some 300 tonnes of cocaine had passed through Guinea-Bissau every year.
• Only 334 kilos had been seized by police, she said at the first graduation ceremony of police trained in Brazil to combat drug-trafficking.
• They will have a tough job, given the weakness of the country's government, the poverty of its inhabitants, widespread corruption and the almost total lack of a judicial system.

The Rest @ Radioalgo

Guinea -Bissau gets Policer Equipment Upgrade from UN

BISSAU, June 19 (Reuters) -By Alberto Dabo The United Nations and European Union are to help set up an elite police anti-narcotics unit in Guinea-Bissau to combat trafficking by Colombian cocaine cartels, a U.N. official said on Thursday.

Police in the small West African country, one of the world's poorest states, have been fighting an unequal battle against powerful drug-smuggling gangs who have been using the former Portuguese colony as a transit hub to ship cocaine to Europe.

While the cartels have deployed planes, boats and off-road vehicles to carry the drugs across Guinea-Bissau, the country's judicial police have often lacked cars, petrol, computers and even handcuffs with which to investigate and pursue them.

Antonio Mazzitelli, West Africa representative for the U.N. Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said the European Union was providing $2 million euros ($3 million) to finance setting up the anti-drugs unit within Guinea-Bissau's judicial police.

"The programme will provide for strengthening the operational capability with equipment, as well as training," Mazzitelli told Reuters in Bissau, where the agreement was signed on Wednesday with Guinea-Bissau's judicial police.

The UNODC plan would provide the police with basic equipment like vehicles, communications gear, fuel, bullet-proof vests and even generators to allow vital police work to continue in a country where power blackouts are frequent.

The funds would also cover training and the modernisation of offices for the judicial police, who had been working out of a ramshackle building in downtown Bissau.

This would include the creation of a secure temporary detention centre for suspects. Several suspected Colombian drug traffickers arrested by Guinea-Bissau police over the last two years have walked free, released by compliant local magistrates.

UNODC experts say administrative and judicial corruption is a problem in Guinea-Bissau and they are also working on an system of incentives for the judicial police to prevent graft.
In April, Judicial Police Director Lucinda Ahukharie threatened to quit after rival policemen shot dead one of her counternarcotics officers in a revenge killing.

Mazzitelli said the 2 million euros from the EU was part of around $5 million dollars of international funding the UNODC had managed to secure to strengthen Guinea-Bissau's fight against the drug-traffickers.

The Rest @ Alertnent

Guinea-Bissau's Military Structure

BISSAU, June 25 (Reuters) - Imagine an army with more officers than soldiers, a penchant for coups and for meddling in politics, but no tanks or planes to defend the nation.

These are Guinea-Bissau's armed forces, the remnants of a once proud guerrilla army which won the small West African state independence from Portugal in 1974 after a bush war.

Since then, the army has tarnished its image with a series of bloody coups and mutinies, a fratricidal 1998-1999 civil war, and a 2004 revolt that killed the army chief.

Foreign donors are worried that senior members of the armed forces are now collaborating with Colombian cocaine cartels which use the small coastal nation -- one of the poorest countries in the world -- as a transit hub for drug shipments. .....

.......A U.N.-funded census of the forces threw up some astonishing figures:

• Of nearly 4,500 members registered, more than 3,000 were officers, 1,800 of them holding the rank of major or above.
• Of the 4,500, only six were younger than 20, and there must be hundreds older than 60 ... it's an old army and it has no plain soldiers," said Verastegui, adding that its ranks were bloated by veterans from the 1963-1974 independence war.
• The army fought dissident Senegalese Casamance separatists on its northern border only two years ago, but Verastegui said there were "more people sitting at home than under arms".
• "It's an army where the soldiers aren't in the barracks, where the real reason for wearing a uniform is ... to have a meal and a pension," said the Spanish army general, a 56-year-old artillery and aviation specialist.

The restructuring plan, for which the government has estimated a $184 million bill it hopes foreign donors will pay, aims to reduce the armed forces to only 2,500 members. The same plan will overhaul the police and judiciary.

Adding urgency to the security reform, Guinea-Bissau is scheduled to hold a parliamentary election in November and international observers and local politicians are hoping the military will not be tempted to interfere in the vote.

Verastegui said his overtures to win the confidence of military chiefs, including the armed forces head General Batista Tagme Na Wai, had encountered some suspicion.

"They don't really understand why we're here, they think we've come to tell them what to do," he said. He said Vieira's government and military commanders must decide what kind of army they want.

• Soldiers laid off would also need livelihoods and dignity to avoid storing up future trouble.
  As it stands, the top-heavy Guinea-Bissau military would be hard pressed to protect its land frontiers or jagged coastline, which U.N. anti-narcotics experts say are being constantly penetrated by drug-traffickers' planes and boats.
• "How many vehicles do the frontier police have?
• None.
• How many aircraft does the country have for border control?
• None.
• Boats? There are one or two -- but they'd have trouble getting them onto the water," Verastegui said.

"An army which sits in the barracks thinking about things that it shouldn't, will end up doing them."

The Rest @alertnet.com

Lucinda Ahukharie Threatens to Quit in West African Narco State

By Alberto Dabo
BISSAU, April 14 (Reuters) - The chief of Guinea-Bissau's anti-drugs police has threatened to quit after rival policemen shot a counternarcotics officer in a revenge killing that undermines the country's fight against cocaine cartels.

Judicial Police Director Lucinda Ahukharie offered her resignation after members of an elite rapid response police unit broke into her headquarters on Sunday and tortured and shot dead one of her officers, accused of killing one of their members.

The body of the slain anti-drugs officer was then dumped in the street outside the ramshackle judicial police offices in the capital of the tiny, cash-strapped West African state, which Colombian cartels have targeted for their drugs operations.

Using boats and planes, the cartels have been smuggling tonnes of cocaine from Latin America to Europe, setting up clandestine airstrips, embarcation points and storage depots on Guinea-Bissau's jagged coastline and in its jungle interior.

Police sources said Ahukharie had demanded a full investigation into Sunday's incident, saying her small, under-equipped anti-drugs force of nearly 80 officers could not carry out their job if their own security was under threat.

"What we're seeing is state authority relegated to the level of the streets. How can we work in these conditions?" a judicial police officer, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.

Justice Minister Carmelita Pires promised a full inquiry and said the police killers of counternarcotics officer Liberato Neves had been identified and would be "severely punished".
The day before his own killing, Neves had shot dead a member of the Interior Ministry's

Angolan-trained rapid response police in a confused brawl involving several police officers. He was being held in his own HQ when he was dragged out and killed.
Several prisoners also escaped.

Pires refused to accept Ahukharie's resignation, saying she believed the judicial police chief would reconsider.

NEED FOR SECURITY REFORM

Out-gunned by the cocaine cartels, Guinea-Bissau's beleaguered and under-funded anti-drugs police say they lack computers, radios, vehicles and even petrol to act against the drug traffickers. They often have to ask to borrow cars.

To try to stop Guinea-Bissau turning into a "narco-state", the United Nations and western governments have backed Ahukharie's judicial police in their unequal fight against the cartels, helping them to make some seizures and arrests.

The Rest @ Reuters Africa

Guinea-Bissau Consolidating Military Control?

Guinea-Bissau Army Chief of Staff disarms police, brews apprehension

APA-Bissau (Guinea-Bissau) The Army Chief of Staff in Guinea-Bissau, Gen. Batista Tagme Na Wai on Tuesday, disarmed the police in the capital, Bissau, during a surprise visit to the Internal Affairs Ministry.

Gen. Na Wai gave no explanation for the action which has led the public into believing that something unpleasant could erupt.

Following the army boss’s order the stock piled of weapons in the premises of the internal affairs ministry and in the various police stations in Bissau were collected and transferred to the Army Staff headquarters.

The move was followed by the sacking of Salvador Soares, the Director of Armament and Ammunitions at the Internal Affairs Ministry and replaced by Dety Ifanda, a close relative to Gen. Tagme Na Wai.

The policemen who were guarding the Minister Certorio Biote were also replaced by soldiers upon decision of the Chief of Staff.

Several police officials contacted by APA refused to comment on the move which many consider here as "sensitive."

"This is an extremely sensitive issue", a police officer who begged for anonymity said.

The Rest @ African Press Agency

Guinnea Bissau Captures and Extradites 5 al Qaeda Suspects to Mauritania

BISSAU, Jan 12 (Reuters) - Guinea-Bissau extradited five suspected members of al Qaeda to Mauritania on Saturday, a day after they were arrested in connection with the killing of four French tourists in Mauritania last month.

"Guinea-Bissau will pay for what it has done," one of the five Mauritanians said as he was bundled into a plane by the security forces in Bissau. "Watch out! If I'd had a gun I would have killed you all," he shouted to the security officers, speaking in the local Creole language.

On Dec. 24, three attackers, who Mauritanian officials said were suspected Islamic militants linked to al Qaeda, gunned down four French tourists and wounded a fifth as they enjoyed a Christmas Eve picnic on a road in southern Mauritania.

Police in Guinea-Bissau arrested the five Mauritanians on Friday and said later two of them had admitted belonging to al Qaeda. At least three of the men were wanted in direct connection with the killings, the authorities in Bissau said.

The Rest @ Reuters Africa

Last Wake Up Call from Guinea Bissau - Africa's First Narco State

Guinea Bissau is one of the poorest countries in the world, but visit a local nightclub and you soon discover that some people there are making a lot of money.

Top-of-the-range four-wheel drive vehicles can be seen parked outside and whisky seems to be the favoured drink. Each glass costs several times the average daily income of less than $1 a day.

This money is not coming from the country's traditional mainstay, cashew nuts. It is coming from cocaine.

"We can see these people walking in complete freedom; they are parading their wealth," says Jamel Handem, the head of a coalition of civic groups known as Platform GB.

"They're showing it completely openly."

See map of West African cocaine seizures

The geography of the country is crucial, according to university rector and social commentator Fafali Kudawo.

"This is a country that has a mainland, and a group of islands - an archipelago - and the maritime part of the country is bigger than the mainland," he says.
"And the country doesn't have a navy to control all that space. It's an open border for whoever wants to bring drugs into the country."

The near-total absence of the rule of law also makes Guinea Bissau attractive to drugs.

Lucinda Aukarie: Tonnes of cocaine pass through Guinea Bissau each week"Law enforcement has literally no control for two reasons: there is no capacity and there is no equipment," says Amado Philip de Andres, the deputy regional head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). ...
..."The head of the judicial police, Lucinda Aukarie, knows she is confronting a massive problem.
"We not sure exactly how much cocaine is moving through the country, but we think each week there are tonnes," she says......

....."This is now actually the last wake-up call that the international community can receive," he says.

"Please act now, we have to act now. If we don't the situation will explode.
"Drug traffickers know that they can move freely in Bissau, they will do it, they will take control of the region, they will coordinate and we'll all be the losers - meaning the international community and West African countries."

A donor conference to be held in Portugal on 19 December may signal a change of attitude.
If not, Guinea Bissau faces the prospect of becoming a unique type of failed state - a "narco-state" - run mainly for the benefit of drugs gangs.

The Rest @ the BBC

Mali-600 kilos Cocaine

From IRIN, first published 5 July 2007

Mali-Niger

Two big drug busts of more than 600 kilos of cocaine in Mauritanian and Niger in recent weeks show authorities can stem some of the flow, but U.N. officials say a far greater volume of narcotics is getting through. -May 26, 2007 alertnet

Guinnea Bissau

• The biggest happened in September [2006], when police found 674 kg of cocaine.
• A second bust of another 600 kg came in the spring [2007].
• In April, authorities in Burkina Faso intercepted 49 kg of cocaine on the border with Mali. In May, Mauritanian authorities discovered 630 kg of cocaine in an abandoned aeroplane near the airport in Nouadhibou, 500 km north of the capital Nouakchott.
  

Mauritania

• The smuggling into Mauritania of a previous batch of more than 600 kilograms of cocaine seized after a small plane made an emergency landing at the northern port of Noudhibou in May, 2007], led to a discover of 1,896 lbs (860 kilograms) of cocaine on 14 August in NOUAKCHOTT (Mauritania), were found hidden beneath sacks of rice in a parked minibus.

Dominique Lebleux published this report (Article is in French) in September, 2007, which gives a detailed analysis of European Drub Busts of traveling Africans, in 2007, including this:

January 2007: - Flight Bamako (Mali)-Amsterdam (Belgium).

• Three [aleged] Nigerians were stopped at the airport of Casablanca (Morocco).
• Alltogether they transported altogether 4.5 kg of drugs in the form of a 209 capsules ingested.