Sunday, September 24, 2023

Were those really part of the shipment?

The Customs Department of the Liberia Revenue Authority has seized and transferred three boxes of confiscated narcotics drugs and 13 pieces of guns to the appropriate government entities.

Those look like home-made shotgun-shell-shooting pistols. The contents of the plastic bags in the right side of the picture seem fibrous--marijuana or khat? But those pistols: it looks likes there's a cottage industry churning them out. I wonder what the trigger mechanism looks like. I also wonder if those are the pistols that LRA found in the shipment, or something LRA already had on hand. If I had the money to smuggle lots of drugs, I'd smuggle some better weapons along with them.

UPDATE: not-homemade, Grim identified them. Still, they look like substitutes.

3 comments:

  1. And the answer is . . . no.

    Perhaps the article was updated since you saw it --

    • The drugs were found at the RIA Cargo warehouse as meth in a shipment of Organic Stevia Green Tea Leaf having entered the country via Kenya Airways flight (KQ 508) on 11 September.

    • The guns (which really look like 12-gauge signaling-flare hardware to me, but I'm no expert) came in overland and were found at the Yeala Customs Business Office in a routine inspection of a trader entering from Guinea.

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  2. Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.

    (Interesting in that statement that it only makes sense if the sheep is a good deal more valuable than the lamb. Wool and meat in quantity rather than for luxury goods.)

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  3. I agree with Douglas2: those are flare guns.

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