A British-Nigerian grandmother has been arrested after allegedly trying to smuggle £1 million worth of cocaine onto a London-bound flight inside plantain peels.
Mary Yetunde Barek, 67, was arrested at Murtala Muhammed airport in Lagos as she tried to board a Virgin Atlantic flight to Heathrow on June 28.
She had around 13kg of cocaine in her luggage, with a street value of more than £1 million, according to Nigeria’s National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA)
Ms Barek admitted “full ownership of the recovered cocaine”, after she was apprehended, the NDLEA said.
Ms Barek, who works as a carer in the UK, concealed the drugs “in peels of plantain which appeared as real plantains” and were packed among other food items”, according to the NDLEA.
A video posted on social media by the Drug Enforcement Agency showed authorities searching through two large suitcases to find brightly patterned plastic bags containing what appeared to be bundles of plantains.
However, once officers sliced into the peels, they discovered packaged powder that set off a drug detector.
— NDLEA NIGERIA (@ndlea_nigeria) July 5, 2026
West Africa has become a major logistics and redistribution hub for the international cocaine trade, according to the Swiss think tank Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime (GI-TOC).
Around a third of the cocaine in Europe comes through the region, and cocaine trafficking was the fastest-growing criminal market in Nigeria and its neighbours between 2019 and 2025, GI-TOC said.
Many gangs that dominate the British drug trade, such as those from the western Balkans, operate across west Africa, according to the National Crime Agency (NCA).
This latest arrest comes shortly after a British mother and her daughter were arrested at a Spanish airport after allegedly trying to fly back to the UK with 42kg of cocaine.
The pair, aged 47 and 19, were alleged to have posed as tourists visiting Valencia before attempting to return to Britain with two suitcases containing 23 packets of cocaine of the class-A drug.
