A £1m taxpayer-funded anti-trafficking campaign to stem the flow of cocaine into the UK through Ghana's busiest airport is beset by corruption, with drugs police sabotaging expensive British-bought scanning equipment and tipping off smugglers, leaked US embassy cables reveal.

Ghana president John Atta Mills even worried that his own entourage could be smuggling drugs through his presidential lounge at Accra's Kotoka airport and asked a senior UK customs official last November for help to screen them "in the privacy of his suite to avoid any surprises if they are caught carrying drugs", according to the US embassy in Accra (cable 234015).

guardian.co.uk
modernghana.com
thestar.co.za
monstersandcritics.com
This cable was created on 08 October 2009, according to WikiLeaks

Immigration agents discovered a 13-foot drug tunnel stretching from the Mexican border to a metered parking space in Arizona, where vehicles with holes cut in the bottom would park and take marijuana from people inside the underground space.

"It was pretty brazen," said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Vincent Picard. "Right in the middle of downtown Nogales."

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kvoa.com

This year's death toll in drug-related violence in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, the hardest hit by Mexico's drug war, rose to 3,000 Tuesday after two men were shot dead on a street, authorities said.

Ciudad Juarez has seen its homicide rate rise to one of the highest in the world after vicious turf battles broke out between gangs representing the Juarez and Sinaloa drug cartels in 2008.

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chron.com
bbc.co.uk

Mexico's Congress voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to strip parliamentary immunity from a congressman accused of links to a drug cartel, the first time a sitting Mexican lawmaker has faced charges of ties to organized crime.

Legislators voted 384-2 to lift the immunity of Julio César Godoy, a congressman from the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution. Mr. Godoy, 45 years old, has been accused by Mexican prosecutors of ties to La Familia, a violent cartel based in the western state of Michoacán.

wsj.com