BANJUL: Gambia has arrested a Nigerian drug smuggler who confessed to swallowing 72 cocaine pellets, the anti-narcotics agency of the tiny west African nation said Wednesday.
Airport security was tipped off by the intelligence services that a suspected smuggler had boarded a Nigerian airliner heading to Banjul.
"Upon arrival at the airport with Arik airlines, the suspect was arrested, interrogated and he denied having anything," Abdoulie Ceesay, the anti-drug agency's spokesperson, told state television.
"He was then kept for some time under observation and... he then started to confess to the officers that he indeed swallowed 72 pellets of cocaine," Ceesay said.
A Nigerian woman was arrested in the United States in March with a record 180 pellets -- or more than two kilogrammes -- of heroin in her stomach.