A Nigerian woman, Bola Adebisi, set an unenviable world record for the amount of ingested heroin ever recovered when she tried to smuggle five pounds of heroin in 180 pellets into the U.S. The previous record was four pounds of heroin ingested in 100 pellets.
Airport authorities at the Dulles International Airport, say that 52-year-old Bola Adebisi ingested an incredible 180 thumb-sized pellets filled with heroin.
Airport officers became suspicious when she was questioned after arriving on Ethiopian Airlines flight 500 from Adis Ababa.
Adebisi claimed she was visiting her brother in the U.S., but she was unable to give details of her “brother” and his address. A routine pat-down showed that her belly was suspiciously rigid, and an X-ray revealed to astonished officials that she had in her stomach 180 thumb-sized pellets with a total weight of five pounds.
Steve Sapp of the Customs and Border Protection, said: “We were kind of shocked and surprised at the sheer number of pellets she ingested. We usually see men twice her size ingest about half of what she did.”
According to International Business Times, Adebisi broke a previous record for ingested drugs set on March 30, 2011, by another Nigerian man.
The 46-year-old Yomade Aborishade of Lagos, Nigeria, was arrested for ingesting four pounds of heroin in 100 pellets. The lady was taken to the hospital where overnight, she passed out all the pellets containing heroin worth an estimated 150,000 pounds.
Christopher Hess, director of Customs and Border Patrol for Washington D.C. said: “The amount of pellets and heroin this woman ingested is incredible, a serious health risk, and very troubling if these numbers become the new normal.”
ALSO SEE: Nigerian Couple Jailed For Money Laundering And Human Trafficking.
Authorities say drug mules often attempt to smuggle heroin and cocaine, and sometimes ecstasy by swallowing latex balloons, often condoms or fingers of latex gloves or other special pellets filled with the drugs and later recovered from faeces.
It is a medically dangerous way of smuggling small amounts of drugs and a mule can die if packet bursts or leaks before exiting the body. Statistics from 2003 show over 50% of foreign females in UK jails were drug mules from Jamaica, with Nigerian women making a large contribution to the balance.
Adebisi, according to MSNBC, will be prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
