Lebanese Customs seized 46.7kg of cocaine from a passenger who flew into Beirut from Accra, the largest drug seizure in the history of Beirut's Rafic Hariri International Airport.
The Syrian passenger, identified only by the initials B.H., arrived on Middle East Airlines flight MEA 576 on Saturday, 31 October. Customs officers found 40 packages of cocaine in his luggage, wrapped to avoid detection by scanners and fitted with electronic tracking devices.
Lebanese Customs said he had entered Lebanon from Syria several weeks earlier, then travelled to Accra and returned with the drugs, suggesting he was a courier for an organised smuggling network.
Ghana's Narcotics Control Commission (NACOC) said on 1 November that the arrest followed a controlled delivery run jointly with Lebanese authorities, in which a detected shipment is allowed to move under watch to identify those behind it. NACOC said it is working to arrest his accomplices in Ghana. It did not say whether anyone has been arrested so far.
The seizure comes a month after the Ghana Airports Company introduced mandatory luggage pre-screening at Accra's departure hall on 2 October, and asked passengers to arrive three hours before flights. Those checks followed a 17 September meeting of security chiefs called by President John Dramani Mahama, after which the government said 10 people, including four Customs officers, were being held over drug trafficking investigations.