Nearly three weeks later, police are still stuck with the body of an unidentified man who died when one of the drug pellets he was carrying in his stomach burst.
His body is lying in the mortuary at Mulago hospital. He was picked up dead in Kiwawu village on the Kampala-Mityana highway on July 12; and no one has gone to claim his body yet. This man between 45 and 55 years had no distinguishing features such as scars, tattoos, or birthmark and is possibly, a non-Ugandan.
At post-mortem, 41 narcotic pellets were retrieved from his stomach out of which one had opened up. The type of narcotic drug has since been identified as heroin weighing about 500 grammes worth $60,000 (about Shs200m).
Dr Moses Byaruhanga, the police pathologist, says the victim could have collapsed after reacting to the drugs released from the torn pellet.
The body was found in a decomposing state and appeared to have been lifeless for about 36 hours.
The pellets suggest that they had been swallowed about four hours earlier in preparation to smuggle them to a particular destination, most likely out of the country.
On February 18, police at the airport arrested Rogers Valenti, a Uruguayan, with 40 packs of liquid narcotic drugs which he had stuffed in his stomach. While in custody, he expelled one condom filled with liquid narcotic drugs.
What police say
Mr Lodovick Awita, the Entebbe airport police commandant, says Valenti’s condition deteriorated after he threw up whereupon he was taken to Mulago Hospital where he died upon arrival.
Although some of the drug traffickers have died or been arrested, there are those who have successfully smuggled the drugs. For instance, a local daily recently reported a story of Olivia, a Ugandan girl, who made four trips to London in nine months, each time swallowing 120 pellets of cocaine.
This girl once slipped through the hands of customs officers at Gatwick Airport in the UK, but three of her friends were arrested and detained. Olivia decided to quit the job after she saw a drug pellet protruding through a man’s stomach after he failed to defecate soon enough.
People who stuff drugs in their bodies do so to earn huge amount of money within the shortest period. One earns commission depending on the amount of drugs they have smuggled.
Much as this appears to be a quick way to make money, it’s a very deadly enterprise that stresses the body and mind when inserting the pellets into the body.
Dr Byaruhanga says he has experienced four cases of people who have died after stuffing drugs, for the 13 years he has been practicing pathology.
How traffickers die
He says the victims all died after cocaine pellets opened up in their stomachs, adding that cocaine and heroin are the most smuggled drugs because they are highly demanded by drug lords.
Dr Byaruhanga says pellets get stuffed into the stomach through the mouth when someone is made to lose consciousness. The pellets are wrapped into a soft, slippery material known as cellophane.
The inserters make sure they don’t rupture the throat including other internal organs during stuffing.
The stuffing is done when the person is about to board a plane. They calculate very well the time the person would spend on flight.
“Drug couriers do not eat or drink anything while on board. This is because feeding speeds up digestion and makes them pass out the drugs before their destination,” he says.
By the time they arrive at their destination, they are already weak, dehydrated and exhausted. Plane managers become suspicious of any person who refuses to drink or eat anything while on the flight. That is how they get arrested while on flight or upon arrival.
Mr Awita says it is difficult to know the degree of drug smuggling because they only arrest those who smuggle drugs through the airport. “Such people are not easy to notice because we don’t have sensors that can detect drugs in the stomach.
We only do through checking including monitoring every visitor till they go back. Smugglers do not easily reveal their counterparts,”
In such scenarios police check travel documents or liaise with Interpol to know where the perpetrator had picked or is taking the drugs.
WHAT LAW SAYS
The Transfer of Convicted Offenders Act passed in 2012 empowers the minister “in appropriate cases to extend the provisions of this Act to countries not in the Commonwealth,” but it is limited by the fact that Chinese anti-drug laws do not correspond with those in Uganda.
The Act amends the provision of Penal Code Act that does not offer deterrent sentence for offenders.
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