Published: June 19, 2026
MONROVIA — When the Liberia Drug Enforcement Agency announced that it had intercepted 237.6 kilograms of cocaine bound for Europe through Roberts International Airport, it presented the seizure as proof of capability. The harder question, set against the agency’s own recent history, is whether an institution reshaped from the top four times in two years was ever ready to run the investigation that the seizure demands.
The LDEA reports that a targeted operation on June 8 recovered 198 compressed cocaine plates hidden in six cargo boxes, which were processed for export through Brussels Airlines, with an estimated street value of $19,226,000. The National Security Council classified the case as a Joint National Security Investigation, and President Joseph Boakai confirmed on June 16 that it is being handled by the LDEA, the Liberia National Police, and a number of supporting agencies due to its suspected transnational scope.
A case like this is not a street arrest. It requires unbroken chain of custody across days of airport handling, forensic discipline, financial intelligence, foreign liaison with European authorities, and the institutional memory to coordinate all of it without dropping a thread. Those are the capabilities most damaged by leadership instability. And the LDEA has had little but leadership instability for two years.
Four arrangements in two years
The turbulence began on June 3, 2024, with what the Executive Mansion described only as “acts of disorder and chaos” at LDEA headquarters. A day later, Boakai suspended Director General Abraham S. Kromah and his two deputies, Hassan Fadiga and Gbawou Kowou, without pay and pending investigation, and installed Christopher S. Peters Sr. as officer in charge.
The interim fix did not satisfy the agency. Peters resigned effective Oct. 10, 2024, and Boakai appointed Anthony Souh as acting director general the same day. On Nov. 1, 2024, the president formally relieved Kromah, Fadiga, and Kowou, and nominated Souh as director general, subject to Senate confirmation. On Nov. 29, 2024, the administration restructured the deputy tier, appointing Sebastian Farr for operations and Gwee K. Porkpah for administration.
Even that reconstruction failed to hold. On Aug. 28, 2025, the presidency announced it had dismissed LDEA top officials for what it called “administrative reasons” and appointed an interim management team. By the time the cocaine moved through RIA in June 2026, Fitzgerald T.M. Biago has been playing the role of officer in charge, with Ernest T. Tarpeh and Patrick Kormazu as deputies.
Five command structures in two years, if the current one is counted, is not the profile of a stable enforcement body.
The complexity behind the changes
The changes were not clean, and that matters as much as their frequency. The Boakai administration did not move in one step from a discredited team to a settled replacement. It moved through an officer in charge, then an acting director, then a nomination, then a delayed deputy rebuild, then another purge. That staggered cadence suggests contestation behind the scenes, whether over the facts of June 3, over Senate timing, or over who could be trusted to hold the agency together.
The reasons given only made things more confusing rather than clarifying them. The Nov. 1, 2024, removal of Kromah and his deputies was said to be the result of a Ministry of Justice investigation into the June 3 incident. However, that investigative report was never made available to the public. The government based its actions on a document that confirmed an inquiry took place but did not release any of its findings, never explained what occurred inside the building, never indicated whether force was used or which rules were broken, and never assigned blame among the three men. There was no public hearing, no audit, and no response from the officials who were removed. The justification for ending three careers at the head of the country’s drug agency remains a report that Liberians have never seen.
Peters, the interim officer in charge, was credited in his October resignation notice with seizures worth $4 million and with securing long sentences for traffickers, a sign the emergency stewardship produced results. Souh was still being described as acting director as late as August 2025, raising questions about whether his November 2024 nomination was ever confirmed. By 2026, the top of the agency had changed hands yet again, to a team led by an officer in charge rather than a confirmed director.
This is the institution that inherited the biggest cocaine case under this administration. It did so without a settled, confirmed director general, on the strength of an undisclosed report that itself had emptied the leadership two years earlier.
A case that exposes the gaps
The handling of the seizure reads, in places, less like deliberate secrecy and more like an agency stretched past its capacity.
Document-based reporting shows the cargo may have entered the airport system on June 4 or 5, a few days before the official June 8 interdiction, and suggests a planned departure on Brussels Airlines SN241 for June 12 instead of June 9. These documents also identify the shipper as Emre Venn Group of Companies in Sinkor and the consignee as Usman Ali of Birmingham, England, with the shipment traveling under Air Waybill No. 020-07407960 via Brussels to London Heathrow.
Witness memoranda describe a multi-day chain of events rather than a single airport intercept: dense X-ray images flagged on June 5, a physical search requested, a white, powdery substance discovered on June 7, and the boxes turned over to the LDEA on June 8. That reconstruction is why the 13th Judicial Circuit Court has issued subpoenas duces tecum to RIA management and to ground handler GLS Mengies, demanding waybills, cargo records and CCTV footage, with a June 29 appearance set in the GLS matter.
Reporting has linked the shipment’s foreign route to a potential connection with Dutch fugitive trafficker Jos Leijdekkers, one of Europe’s most wanted men, who is allegedly in Sierra Leone. No Liberian authority has publicly charged him in the RIA case, and the link remains plausible but unproven. Meanwhile, six airport security officers and VIP Lounge staff are reportedly under investigation, even though witness accounts suggest some of those officers may have detected the cargo rather than helped facilitate it, highlighting an unresolved boundary between insider collusion and routine staff review when they found the boxes.
Lawmakers were told six suspected traffickers were in custody, yet Justice Minister N. Oswald Tweh told the House on June 16 that “no one has been arrested” and that investigators were only questioning persons of interest. The agency has publicly named just one suspect, Emmanuel Zeon, while the Justice Minister conceded that authorities did not know whether Zeon was dead or alive. An agency in firm command of its investigation does not, weeks in, leave open whether its lone named suspect exists.
The readiness question
The subpoenas, the multi-agency structure under the National Security Council, and the reported foreign cooperation show investigative reach. The seizure was made. The cargo did not leave.
But readiness is not the same as a single successful interdiction. It is the ability to see a complex case through to a credible conclusion, and by that standard, the record is harsh. An agency cannot build the institutional memory, the chain-of-command discipline, or the foreign-liaison relationships that a transnational case demands while it is being reset every few months. The very instability that the government invoked “disorder and chaos” and “administrative reasons” to address was never fully explained, which means that even the remedy left the public unable to judge whether the agency was being strengthened or simply shuffled.
The STAND coalition has called for an independent international investigation and given a 72-hour deadline for the agency to release names. Sen. Amara Konneh described the case as a security failure. Clarence Moniba warned against “selective justice.” Their distrust isn’t really about June 3, 2024. It’s about whether an agency that has struggled for two years to establish its command can be trusted to handle a case this important to the end.
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