Nigerian arraigned for trafficking £500,000 cocaine

A Nigerian drug courier was arraigned at a Scotland court on Monday after he was found to have four bags of cocaine pellets, weighing almost 1.5 kilos in total, hidden in his jacket and socks.

Cletus Okpala was caught with a haul of high purity cocaine worth almost £500,000 on the streets as police targeted suspected high ranking members of an organised crime gang.

Okpala told officers he did not know he had the Class A drug in his possession and even denied knowing what cocaine was.

He was stopped by police on the M8 motorway near the Shotts junction, in Lanarkshire, as he ferried the consignment from Edinburgh to Glasgow.

But the High Court in Edinburgh heard that some of it was 10 times the purity of cocaine sold on the streets and it could have been cut and bulked out to provide 12 kilos of the drug.

Okpala, 26, who is married to a Latvian woman, admitted being caught with the Class A drug on November 4, 2011, when he appeared in court on Monday.

Advocate depute Richard Goddard said that during an investigation by Scottish Crime and Drugs Enforcement Agency officers into the activities of “a number of persons believed to be high level members of an organised crime group involved in the importation and distribution of controlled drugs,” information was received that a courier was to transport cocaine between the cities.

Okpala was identified and put under surveillance before police pulled him over in the Nissan Primera car he was driving.

Officers saw there were two “quite bulky” packages in his jacket before finding more in his socks. Okpala said he did not know what they were and that he was “just taking them to a man”.

Culled from PUNCH