540kg Seized Hemp Eaten By Rats, Say Police Officers

Eight police officers have been dismissed for claiming rats ate narcotic drugs in their custody,reminiscing recent cases in Nigeria where wild animals were blamed for missing funds.

This followed Investigation which revealed that 540kg of marijuana,out of the 6,000kg impounded, was missing from a police warehouse in Pilar, north-west of Buenos Aires,BBC has reported.

The city’s former police commissioner, Javier Specia, and fellow officers told a judge the drugs were “eaten by mice.”

It is recalled that a giant snake was recently fingered in Makurdi, Benue State, as the culprit in the missing case of N36m belonging to the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB).

Philomina Chieshe, a worker with the examination body, said the money, which was part of the proceeds of the sales of scratch cards,was swallowed by a snake in a mysterious way.

This is as Senator Shehu Sani (APC, Kaduna) also told newsmen that N72m belonging to the Nothern Governors Forum was eaten by monkeys in a Senator’s farm,following the removal of Senator Abdullahi Adamu as the chairman of the Forum on the heels of the discovery.

However, as it was in the JAMB and Nothern Governors Forum cases, forensic experts doubted rats would see the drugs as food, and would have probably died if they had eaten it.

A spokesperson for Judge Adrián González Charvay said that according to experts at Buenos Aires University, “mice wouldn’t mistake the drug for food” and even if they did, “a lot of corpses would have been found in the warehouse”.

The police officers will now testify in front of the judge on May 4, according to the report.

The court will decide if the drugs are missing due to “expedience or negligence”.

A 6,000kg haul of marijuana has been in storage at the warehouse for the past two years.

But Mr Specia’s successor, Emilio Portero, noticed the missing drugs when he took over the commissioner role, said the report.

Portero alerted the police force’s internal affairs division, who then searched the warehouse and found only 5,460kg remaining.

Suspicion fell on Specia after authorities discovered he did not sign the inventory for the impounded drugs when he left his post in April 2017.

The former commissioner is also reportedly under investigation for not yet filing a sworn income statement for last year.