Hajj Pilgrims Busted

Last Friday, Ghanaians enjoyed the Moslem Feast of Sacrifice with a national holiday. Over a thousand Ghanaians spent the day in Saudi Arabia performing obligatory religious rites, the Hajj, which would confer on them the title of Alhaji or Alhajia.

The second highest-ranking public servant, Alhaji Aliu Mahama, Vice President, led a government delegation to the Hajj and is due back this Thursday to take over from the Speaker of Parliament, who was sworn in on Sunday night as Acting President during the absence of the VP who should have taken over when the President left for Australia to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

Reports reaching The Accra Daily Mail say, even as the VP was attending to official functions to improve the relations between Ghana and Saudi Arabia, some of his compatriots on the Hajj were engaged in exactly the opposite, giving Ghana a terrible reputation in the Holy Land.

The Accra Daily Mail has been informed by its sources in this year's Hajj that a number of Ghanaians were busted trying to export banned narcotic drugs into the Kingdom. One such person, a woman, is said to be a very influential person in her community.

As so often happens with drug traffickers who use all manner of hare-brained tricks to export or import their drugs of death, the Ghanaian suspects are said to have employed the services of the common mango fruit!

According to the sources, mangos, especially the large variety, are extremely popular with some Arabs, and so some pilgrims would normally carry the fruit along to sell and make a little more money to add to their meagre foreign exchange allowances.

Using this guise, the suspects ingeniously found a way of concealing the drugs in the mango fruits, but they were outwitted on the other side.

When The Accra Daily Mail sought confirmation from Ghana's National Narcotics Control Board yesterday, an official said such a report had reached them, but they were waiting for details from the Saudi authorities as to names of the suspects, the quantities and street values.

"We are not able to give you a confirmation, but you can report it as an unconfirmed report," the official told The Accra Daily Mail. The Narcotics Board has been very successful of late in its drug busting in the country, especially drugs arriving through the Kotoka International Airport. However there have been complaints about the Judiciary granting bail to drug suspects and thereby allowing them to flee.

It would be recalled that one of the most bizarre busts in recent times was the one involving a lawn mower in which the motor had been removed and a well-packed consignment hidden inside. A fairly large number of the busts have involved Nigerians using Ghana either as a transit or staging point.

Our Alhajis and Alhajias start arriving home this week. No doubt the Narcotics Board will be eager to meet and debrief some of them.