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Police pursue man who left Sh435,000 bhang at Moyale bus station

Moyale Police Station in Marsabit County. (Photo: Waweru Wairimu)

By Waweru Wairimu | 08 May 2024

The officers discovered the presence of the narcotics using a sniffer dog after the sacks were opened at the Moyale Directorate of Criminal Investigations office.

Police in Marsabit County are pursuing a criminal who abandoned bhang worth Sh435,000 stashed in four sealed sacks of beans at a bus booking office in Moyale.

By the time detectives, who were tipped by a resident, arrived at the scene, the suspect was nowhere to be found as the sacks lay unattended to at the entrance to the office.

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In what would later turn out as a scheme to escape arrest, the suspect while leaving claimed to have gone to pick up authorisation papers from the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) office.

The officers discovered the presence of the narcotics using a sniffer dog after the sacks were opened at the Moyale Directorate of Criminal Investigations office.

"Efforts to trace and arrest the suspect who is still at large are ongoing. The recovered narcotics are being held as exhibits," DCI shared online.

Despite heavy surveillance by a multiagency security team along the Isiolo-Moyale stretch, drug and human trafficking remains rife along the highway with the dealers increasingly changing tack to evade arrests.

The traffickers who source the narcotics from neighbouring countries, take advantage of the porous Kenya-Ethiopia border to sneak the drugs into the country.

From stashing narcotics in sealed compartments in vehicles to tasking bodaboda riders to ferry the drugs via off-the-highway routes and using police vehicles to ensure the safe delivery of huge consignments to Nairobi, the traffickers are hellbent on breaking the law.

Several rogue police officers have in the past been arrested and charged with trafficking drugs worth millions of shillings. Many of the cases are still pending in court.

Motorists plying the Archers Post-Merille-Laisamis stretch are usually subjected to security searches that also involve the use of sniffer dogs.

The security team has, however, been accused of failure to rein in the illegal business which has ruined the lives of many youths, especially in Isiolo which suffers drug proliferation for being a transit to Northern Kenya.

A fortnight ago, a 24-year-old Charles Obaga Kavehere was nabbed with 417 grams of cocaine worth Sh1.8 million hidden under the inner soles of his shoes while travelling in a Nairobi-bound bus from Moyale.

He was arrested at Blue Post in Thika, Kiambu County, following a search of the vehicle by Anti-Narcotics detectives and officers from the Operations Support Unit.

It would later be discovered after a screening at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport that the suspect had swallowed more drugs which he was to egest on reaching his destination.