Published: August 10, 2026
Six days. That is how long Jackson K. Kolako says he sat at police headquarters, from Aug. 1 to Aug. 7, without a single officer taking a statement from him. Not an interrogation he refused. Not a statement he declined to sign. None taken at all. On the third of those days, by his account, he was made to produce two mobile phones and surrender every password on them.
The Ministry of Justice issued a detailed statement on Aug. 9 answering much of what Kolako alleged. It did not answer that. It does not say why he was held for six days, whether he has been charged with anything, or under what authority his phones and passwords were taken. The Constitution allows the state 48 hours. Nothing in the ministry’s account explains the other four days, and the silence is conspicuous in a statement that was otherwise careful to respond point by point.
We say this as an outlet that has spent months arguing Liberia is not serious enough about narcotics. We have not changed our position. We are saying something narrower and, we think, more useful: the surest way to lose the largest drug case in this country’s history is to build it on evidence gathered outside the rules.
Every defense lawyer in Monrovia is reading these two statements right now. What they see is a man detained beyond the constitutional limit, phones and passwords handed over without any warrant described, and no charge on the record. Those are not technicalities. They are the exact grounds on which evidence gets excluded and prosecutions collapse. If the National Security Agency has genuinely developed intelligence that money moved to a prison officer from outside, that is serious and it should be pursued to the end. It should be pursued in a way that survives a courtroom.
The ministry deserves credit on several points, and we will give it. It said plainly that the allegations about money passing to Kolako are not established facts but matters under investigation. That restraint is rare and it is right. It correctly noted that a stand-down order is not a finding of guilt. And it made a defensible argument that an officer posted inside a facility is not entitled to advance notice of every intelligence operation conducted there, because notice can be the leak.
But that argument has a limit, and the ministry’s account walks straight past it. By Kolako’s telling, two men who identified themselves as NSA agents arrived at Monrovia Central Prison in shorts, in violation of the facility’s own rules, and refused to write their names and purpose in the visitor logbook because the mission was covert. Then two senior corrections officials who were not assigned to that facility overrode entry procedures, and one of them said, “We make the law, and we can break the law.”
If any part of that is accurate, it is the most alarming thing in either document. A prison register is not bureaucratic decoration. It is the record of who entered a building holding 1,800 people, including the suspects in the drug case, and it is the only thing that makes it possible afterward to establish who spoke to whom. An operation that cannot be recorded in a logbook is an operation with no accountability trail. Covert work has a place. Inside a correctional facility, unrecorded access to a detainee in an active case is not covert work. It is a gift to whoever later wants to allege tampering.
Two things can be true. Kolako may have obstructed an interview. The state may also have handled his removal in a way that broke the law and endangered a facility. The ministry’s own statement points to the resolution: it noted that no officer is guilty merely because an allegation was made and invited Kolako to bring evidence to investigators. Kolako made the same point from the other side, asking why a disciplinary matter went to the police at all when the Ministry of Justice maintains a disciplinary board. He is entitled to an answer. So is the public.
One thing in Kolako’s statement should be refused outright. He asked the president to transfer everyone detained in connection with the drug case to a holding facility abroad, preferably Morocco, while they await trial. No. Whatever the security argument, a Liberian court has jurisdiction over Liberian pretrial detainees, and a state that ships its accused overseas because it cannot hold them has conceded something it will not get back. The answer to a prison that cannot securely hold 1,800 people is to fix the prison.
His salary claim, that he has never taken home more than US$224 a month in 12 years, is not the defense he thinks it is. Men have been bought for far less than that, which is precisely why this matters. But the way to establish whether he was bought is bank records, transfers and testimony tested in open court, not six days in a cell and a phone unlocked on demand.
Charge him or release him. Then prove it properly.
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