MONROVIA — A viral video has done what a month of drug busts couldn’t quite manage on its own: dragged the president’s family directly into the story. In it, the purported owners of the US$318 million in drugs seized in Liberia last week make vile threats against Joseph Boakai Jr., the son of President Joseph Boakai Sr. — and it’s drawn a strong response from the head of the Executive Protection Service.
By Rodney D. Sieh, rodney.sieh@frontpageafricaonline.com
Sam Gaye confirmed to FrontPageAfrica Monday that the government isn’t afraid of the threats. “Let them come collect their merchandise at the burn site,” he said, confirming a post attributed to him that’s been making the rounds on social media. “We will burn their 4.2 tons of cocaine this week. And we will video tape it and send it to them in Colombia. Bring it on if you’re vexed!! Get in your boat or plane and come meet us at the burn site!” Gaye declared in the post.
The Video and the Threat
In the video itself, two-armed men in military fatigues, holding up samples of the seized drugs, accuse the president’s son of betrayal. “Your end will come soon if you don’t give back our goods, after all we did for you and your father,” one of them says. “We treated you like family, and now you decide to turn your back on us. You turned your phone off so we can’t contact you. This is our last attempt.”
Two Denials
Reached by FrontPageAfrica, Boakai Jr. said he has nothing to do with any drugs issue.Ibrahima Touray, whose photograph turns up in the video circulated by the purported drug owners, denied any involvement too. “I know nothing about this. I want you to believe me. I know nothing about this,” he said. “People have been sending me the video since this morning, but I know nothing about this. If I were to do something like this, it wouldn’t be in Liberia — it would be in Spain, because I’ve been living in Spain for almost 27 years. So, I don’t know nothing about this. Nothing!”
His only real connection to Boakai Jr., Touray said, was a sports-diplomacy trip. “Maybe — I went with the president’s son and the Minister of Youth and Sports, I went to represent them at the Real Madrid Foundation. I even got a video for it, about sport, and I’m doing my thing small-small all my life. Those things, I never see it in my life. I’ve never in my life, since I was born, ever seen drugs in my life. I swear to my children, I don’t know nothing about this, nothing!” He thinks someone lifted his photo to damage his name. “Somebody took my profile picture, took it and is trying to damage my image. I’m a very serious man that’s coming with clean, clean business in that country. It is very, very bad what they are doing with my image. That’s the reality.”
A Relative’s Account: The Call from Spain
Touray’s denial isn’t the whole story, though. A fuller picture of how his name got tangled up in this at all came from a close relative, Sheikh Kuyateh, who described a private conversation he’d had with Touray in a recording aired on SpoonTV Sunday evening, in an interview with host Stanton Witherspoon.
Kuyateh said he asked Touray directly whether he’d done any business with Jojo recently, anything connected to what was circulating online. Touray, swearing to his life, told him the only dealings between them were about sports development — Jojo had introduced him to the Minister of Youth and Sports, the two had traveled to Spain together, and Touray had introduced Jojo to the Real Madrid Foundation.
Then Kuyateh asked something different: had Touray spoken to anyone at all about what was happening in Liberia. The answer, as Kuyateh tells it, got more complicated from there. Touray said he’d gotten a call because his wife is from Equatorial Guinea — one of her relatives had been contacted from Spain by someone saying they had “someone from Liberia” with a problem and asking whether Touray knew anyone who could help intervene. So Touray called a man he identified as Habib, described as someone close to Jojo who works at the NSA, to see whether he could connect them. The three of them — Touray, Habib, and the woman from Spain — ended up on a conference call, where the request for help was made directly. Habib said he could assist but would need to check with his superiors first.
That’s when Kuyateh says he stepped in. “I told him, do you know what they are talking about?” he recalled. Touray’s answer was that “the people said they arrested their people” — a reference, it’s clear now, to the drug arrests. “That’s a drug issue,” Kuyateh says he told him. “Don’t get yourself involved in it.” Touray took the advice on the spot, according to Kuyateh: while the two of them were still on the phone, Habib called back, and Touray cut him off right there, telling him he wanted no part of it.
When FrontPageAfrica asked the NSA about Habib’s alleged role, the agency pushed back hard on the idea that he works there at all. “Habib Shireff is not an NSA agent. Whoever said that he is, is lying,” an NSA official said. “Habib is a friend of Jojo. Also, NSA did not do any background checks for no business call Zoom. Nope!”
Taken as a whole, Kuyateh’s account doesn’t actually implicate Touray — if anything, it describes a man backing away the moment he sensed what he might be walking into. But it’s a useful illustration all the same of how fast a single phone call, made as a favor for an in-law, can start feeding a story that already has a president’s son’s name stuck to it.
Is Liberia Actually Going to Burn $318 Million in Cocaine?
FrontPageAfrica pressed members of the joint investigative team on whether the government plans to destroy the seized drugs. One senior member gave a straight answer: “We were considering burning it before this video came out. The court has to approve before burning, especially the airport busts. According to the lawyers, as long as it is before the court, you must inform the court before burning. That’s the airport busts. However, the VOA bust is also under consideration for burning too.”
So, Gaye’s public dare probably isn’t pure bravado — but it’s not a done deal yet either. Destroying evidence tied to an active prosecution needs court sign-off first, on both the RIA case and the VOA Community seizure, according to the source.
There’s a process behind that, and it’s not improvised. Under Liberian law and standard LDEA protocol, confiscated narcotics are legally required to be destroyed publicly — usually by open burning — to keep things transparent, deter corruption, and show the public that seized drugs aren’t quietly finding their way back onto the market. The LDEA routinely holds public burning ceremonies for large hauls of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and synthetic drugs like Kush, and invites journalists and officials to watch and document it. Before any of that happens, samples get preserved for court proceedings under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, and the bulk burn itself needs formal authorization once a case has moved far enough along, or operational clearance has been granted — which is exactly the sign-off the joint investigative team says it’s still waiting on.
Background: Two Busts, Six Weeks Apart
The threat against Boakai Jr. is the latest flashpoint in a drug crisis that’s consumed Liberia’s national security conversation since early June.
It started June 8, when authorities intercepted 237.6 kilograms of cocaine at Roberts International Airport, worth more than US$19.2 million, hidden in six cargo boxes falsely declared as Maggi cubes and Lappas. Weight discrepancies and a suspicious X-ray flagged the shipment, which sat on the tarmac for two days before anyone found the 198 compressed plates of cocaine inside, bound for Europe. Nearly every principal suspect in that case, including the man authorities say organized the shipment, left the country before warrants caught up with them — a fact that’s dogged the Boakai administration politically ever since, with the opposition arguing the government has moved too slowly, and too selectively, against those implicated.
Then, on July 21, a joint security operation raided a stash house in the VOA Community, Paynesville, and seized 3,971 kilograms of cocaine — the figure Gaye rounded to “4.2 tons” in his post — worth roughly US$318 million. It’s the largest drug bust in Liberia’s history, more than sixteen times the weight of the RIA seizure, and it followed a tip from a cartel member already in custody. Two foreign nationals, a Colombian Spanish dual national and a Serbian national, were arrested at the scene, along with several Liberians. Investigators say both shipments moved into Liberia from Sierra Leone, and officials have said the case has exposed a trafficking network that may have been operating inside the country, and inside its own security institutions, for more than six years.
Why This Video Matters More Than It Should
A viral video making death threats is, on its own, already a crime story. What makes this one different is everything it’s landed on top of.
In the weeks since the VOA Community bust, a police intelligence chief was fired after admitting to taking a $10,000 bribe from suspects in custody. An NSA operative was separately named over an alleged $300,000 payment. Three more police officers were pulled in for questioning over suspected ties to the network. And now a viral video has attached the words “we treated you like family” to the president’s own son, followed within days by a secondhand account of a friend of his fielding a favor request that brushed up against the same case. None of that proves Boakai Jr. did anything wrong — nothing here does, and he’s said plainly that he didn’t. But it does mean the question Liberians are asking isn’t about one video anymore. It’s whether a trafficking network that’s spent six years, by investigators’ own account, burrowing into the NSA and the police has also learned to reach for something more useful than a badge: proximity to power itself. Diplomatic observers say, EPS Director Sam Gaye may just burn four tons of cocaine on camera and mail the footage to Colombia. He can’t burn that question. It’s going to outlast the fire.
