Senegal Jails Latin American Drug Dealers

Three co-defendants from Colombia, France and Senegal were discharged, the paper said.

A court in Senegal has sentenced five Latin Americans to jail terms of up to 10 years for trying to smuggle cocaine through the West African country, local media reported on Saturday.

The seizure of over 2.4 tonnes of cocaine in Senegal mid-2007, half of it on an abandoned yacht, was among the biggest of a series of hauls which highlighted West Africa's growing role as a staging post in trafficking of Colombian cocaine to Europe.

Colombian Arsenic Peralta Prieta and Venezuelan Raffael Fernandez Tena were both sentenced in absentia to 10 years in jail for international drug trafficking, Senegal's L'Observateur newspaper reported.

Both men are on the run and subject to arrest warrants.

Freedy Heranando Rojas, from Ecuador, and Colombians Carlos Omar Estaban Espinoza and Cesar Antonion Villamar Ochoa, who are all in detention in Senegal, were sentenced to eight years in prison for the same crime.

Three co-defendants from Colombia, France and Senegal were discharged, the paper said.

Since national and international law enforcement agencies have cracked down on traditional drug running routes such as Caribbean countries, Latin American cocaine cartels have increasingly used West Africa as a smuggling transit point.

The region's relatively poor policing, remote airstrips and vast, scarcely patrolled shoreline -- including dozens of small islands off Senegal's southern neighbour Guinea-Bissau -- make the region a haven for illicit trafficking, analysts say.

Authorities in Guinea, which also borders Senegal to the south, detained four senior police officials on Friday on suspicion of drug trafficking, Commissioner Moussa Camara, director of the country's Central Anti-Drug Office, told Reuters.

Last month another West African country, Togo, extradited a suspected Colombian drug smuggler to the United States after a police operation backed by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration that also caught seven other Colombians, a Costa Rican and a Mexican, along with several African suspects.