One of Europe’s most-wanted drug lords has been living in Sierra Leone for at least two years, spending time at nightclubs and house parties, sources have told the Guardian.
Johannes Leijdekkers, a Dutch national, has been sentenced in absentia to decades in prison for offences including cocaine trafficking on a vast scale and ordering a murder. In September Dutch police said he remained missing and offered a €200,000 (£170,000) reward for any information leading to his arrest.
In a dramatic development last month that sent ripples through international law enforcement circles, Leijdekkers was seen attending a New Year’s Day church service with Sierra Leone’s presidential family, in footage posted on Facebook by the country’s first lady.
Reuters, which verified the footage using facial recognition technology, quoted sources who said he had been benefitting from high-level protection in Sierra Leone, one of a number of west African transit points for cocaine trafficking from South America to Europe. Responding to the footage, Dutch prosecutors said Leijdekkers had been living in Sierra Leone for at least six months.
But Leijdekkers’ presence can now be dated back to at least December 2022. Multiple sources told the Guardian that he was present at a New Year’s Eve party that year at the Mamba Point resort in the capital, Freetown. The testimony corroborated footage that has been circulating in Sierra Leone of a man who resembles Leijdekkers involved in a fracas at a nightclub. Analysis of the footage showed it had been filmed at Mamba Point. At one point the words “Happy New Year 2023” can be seen on a screen in the background.
Sources also placed Leijdekkers at a house party hosted by a popular Lebanese couple in the Tokeh beach area in December 2023. Footage from the party shows a man resembling Leijdekkers in attendance.
Sources said Leijdekkers has been in a relationship with Agnes Bio, a daughter of Sierra Leone’s president, Julius Maada Bio. Leijdekkers and Bio were sitting next to each other in the church service footage from 1 January this year. Bio is the president’s daughter from a previous relationship with Zainab Kandeh, Sierra Leone’s consul to Morocco. She serves as an alternate representative of Sierra Leone on the UN Security Council.
The Dutchman was also present at Maada Bio’s farm in his hometown of Tihun during a visit in 2024, according to an official in the presidency who spoke anonymously. Footage of a man resembling Leijdekkers has been in circulation showing him being cheered by villagers as he bent to harvest rice.
Leijdekkers, who has assumed numerous aliases and nicknames, including Bolle Jos, was sentenced in absentia by a Rotterdam court last June to 24 years in prison for six drug transports totalling 7,000kg of cocaine, an armed robbery in Finland, and ordering the murder of an associate. He was also given a 10-year sentence in absentia by a court in Belgium in September over an attempt to smuggle drugs via the port of Antwerp in 2020.
Organised criminal groups have long used west African countries as a staging post for cocaine shipments from South America to Europe. The revelations about Leijdekkers come at an awkward moment for the authorities in Sierra Leone, which last month recalled its ambassador from neighbouring Guinea after seven suitcases containing suspected cocaine were found in an embassy vehicle.
After the first reports emerged of Leijdekkers’ presence in Sierra Leone, authorities in Freetown said the president had “no knowledge about the identity and the issues detailed in the reports about the individual in question”. The presidency official told the Guardian that the presidency had been unaware of Leijdekkers’ background until a Reuters report on 24 January. The official gave no further details.
In a press conference last week in Freetown, inspector-general of police William Fayia Sellu, said an “open-source investigation” into the footage from 1 January had determined that the “the individual in the pictures being circulated online is called Omar Sheriff”.
“Raids have been conducted at specific locations where this individual was said to be present and he has not been found yet,” Sellu said. He declined to say how the identity of the man had been determined or whether Omar Sheriff and Johannes Leijdekkers are the same person.
The information minister, Chernor Bah, told the same press conference that investigators were “looking into” whether the man they had identified had been in the country for more than six months. “I don’t think they [police] have established a definite timeframe yet,” Bah later told the Guardian. “At this stage, they are comfortable to say that records for the past six months don’t reveal that person via any formal entry points in our country.”
It remains unclear if Leijdekkers is still in Sierra Leone. Last week, the Dutch justice minister said an extradition request had been sent to authorities in the country. A representative for the Dutch justice ministry did not respond to a request for comments.
Credit: Guardian
