If you’ve seen headlines calling Sierra Leone the world’s first true narco state, you probably want to know three things: is it true, is it safe, and does it change anything for me.
The short version is that a Guardian investigation published today alleges a Dutch fugitive married into the president’s family and has since captured much of the port and parts of the security forces.
None of it has been tested in court, the people named deny or dismiss it, and day to day life for most visitors hasn’t suddenly turned lawless. But the allegations are specific and serious enough that you shouldn’t wave them away.
What’s Actually Been Reported (And What Hasn’t Been Proven)
The Guardian’s investigation draws on dozens of interviews with police and intelligence officers across two continents. Almost all of them spoke anonymously, because the man at the centre has a reputation for reaching people who cross him.
That’s how stories like this get told, but it also means you’re weighing claims, not court findings. I’ll say which is which as we go.
And actually, let me say this before I forget: I haven’t witnessed any of this myself, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. What I can do is tell you what’s been alleged, what’s been denied, and what it means for someone trying to make a sensible decision about Sierra Leone.
Who Is Jos Leijdekkers?
He’s a 35 year old Dutchman from the town of Prinsenbeek. Dutch authorities had watched him rise from local hitman to a key contact for cocaine shipments across the Atlantic, and Europol put his face on a wanted poster in 2022. He’s been sentenced in his absence to more than 100 years for crimes including attempted murder.
According to the reporting, he was first spotted in west Africa in October 2022, when a six vehicle convoy swept down Aberdeen Road towards Lumley beach. Traffic police hadn’t been told to expect VIPs. One officer said it was bigger than the president’s own.
Officers began following it, ended up outside a waterfront house near Hamilton beach at 4am, and found their own bosses at the party. Dutch intelligence traced him to Sierra Leone in 2024. By then, the Guardian says, he’d married the president’s daughter, Agnes Bio, and started a family.
His lawyer calls the allegations politically driven nonsense fed by anonymous sources and the Dutch authorities. The president’s office declined to comment, and the Guardian is clear there’s no suggestion President Bio is implicated in anything illegal. Keep that distinction in your head, because it matters.
Why Freetown’s Port Is the Whole Story
If you wanted a map of why Sierra Leone appeals to a cocaine trafficker, look at where the Queen Elizabeth II Quay sits: roughly halfway between the producers in South America and the buyers in Europe. Everything else is detail.
The Guardian reports that in August 2023 the president’s wife’s uncle, Yankuba Bio, took over as head of the port. He denies a close relationship with anyone called Leijdekkers, and calls claims that the port helps export cocaine false and without foundation. Sources told the paper that port officials on the alleged payroll earn about $2,000 a month, more than thirty times the national average.
That number is worth sitting with. When a state wage is a tiny fraction of what a quiet nod at a gate is allegedly worth, you don’t need a villain to explain what happens next. You just need arithmetic.
The Arconian: 30 Tonnes of Cocaine Nobody Bothered to Hide
On 18 April 2026 a cargo ship called the Arconian, about the length of a football pitch, arrived in Freetown. Western intelligence says around 30 tonnes of cocaine were loaded over the following four days.
Spanish civil guards boarded it on 1 May, about 100 miles off Morocco, in rough black seas. One officer walked into the dark hold and found armed men pointing rifles back at him. Six gunmen were disarmed, and both sides were apparently seconds from opening fire. The bales numbered 1,279, weighing somewhere between 30 and 45 tonnes, and the haul is the largest cocaine seizure on record, valued at €812m.
What struck investigators wasn’t only the size. Nobody had tried to hide it. A UN agent told the Guardian that eight tonnes is about the most anyone can conceal, so 30 tonnes suggests you don’t expect to be stopped.
Windward, a maritime analytics firm, tracked at least three other suspicious vessels that changed identity before leaving Freetown. Another eight with similar patterns have reportedly left for Libya via the Canary Islands since 2024. Sierra Leonean authorities said the cargo came from a mystery transfer at sea, but Lloyd’s List Intelligence found the ship’s speed was steady with no stops.
Anyone who knows Lumley beach knows it as the place Freetown goes to eat grilled fish as the generators start up at dusk. A rusting trawler, the Sky 777, ran aground on that sand last year, and nobody has claimed it. Another vessel drifted onto Hamilton beach, and witnesses described white men hurrying to take packages off it.
The People Who Vanished
This is the part I find hardest to write about, so I’ll keep it factual and keep the allegations labelled as allegations.
In late October 2025, a shop owner named Alan Jalloh, related to the vice president, was dragged into a black Toyota SUV outside a busy supermarket in central Freetown, along with two friends, one of them the footballer Alusine “Bokay” Koroma. Police sources told the Guardian that nine people were taken within a week. No bodies have been found. Intelligence reports allege Jalloh was seen as having betrayed Leijdekkers over a cocaine deal.
Then the investigation reportedly stalled. Police tracked the SUV and arrested three men, but senior officers intervened and they were freed the same day. A warehouse raid turned up cocaine and three people, until about 40 armed soldiers arrived and ordered the police to hand everything over. The lead investigator was transferred. The Guardian says no police statement was ever issued. Police and the military didn’t respond to its questions.
There are other deaths in the reporting. A port worker named John Conteh, who checked container seals, was crushed by machinery in June 2024, and the case was ruled a work accident eight days later. A police superintendent, Matthew Banya, was shot in his car in Makeni in April 2023. Three officers from a specialist unit died in a vehicle crash, and a fourth was found hanged. Intelligence sources told the Guardian that at least 14 people have been killed on Leijdekkers’ orders. Western intelligence considers Conteh’s death suspicious, and every one of these cases remains officially unexplained or classed as accidents.
So, Is Sierra Leone Really a Narco State?
I think the label is useful, but I’d be careful about what it means. A narco state isn’t a country where everyone’s a trafficker. It’s one where the people who should stop it can’t, or won’t.
Which is why the details in the Guardian’s reporting matter more than the headline. Suspects freed within hours. Soldiers overruling police at gunpoint. Investigators moved off cases. If even half of that holds up, you’re not describing a few corrupt individuals. You’re describing a state that’s stopped working as one in an important corner.
Here’s the opinion I’m happy to own: the cocaine isn’t the biggest story. The biggest story is how many people in Europe and the UN apparently had the information and carried on anyway.
The EU, according to the Guardian, agreed a €352m aid package running to 2027, of which €245m has been paid. It added €90m in August 2024, weeks after Dutch intelligence confirmed the government was harbouring the fugitive, and another €35m in January 2025. In June this year it handed two speedboats to the navy, the same military accused of being co opted. The Dutch justice minister, David van Weel, wants aid frozen, but only €18m has been suspended so far.
At the UN, Sierra Leone held a rotating Security Council presidency in 2024, and President Bio now chairs Ecowas. A European diplomat told the Guardian there was no appetite to raise the matter. Britain’s National Crime Agency is reportedly investigating Leijdekkers’ UK links, though the British government hasn’t voiced concerns about Bio’s government.
What It’s Doing to Ordinary Sierra Leoneans
Nearly half the country’s nine million people live in extreme poverty. Sources told the Guardian that only a few hundred benefit from the money.
You can see where it lands. A single dish at Lor restaurant can cost £270, about five months of average pay. Car showrooms line Wilkinson Road, and new apartment blocks keep going up. One politician described a multi storey building put up by a traffic officer.
Cocaine has also reached the street. The price is reportedly the lowest in west Africa, and a drugs campaigner says overdoses are already showing up. The fear is a cheaper crack version spreading beyond the nightclubs.
Then there’s the quiet. A local politician describes a climate of fear. The opposition leader, Abdul Kargbo, says he was warned off the subject. A Dutch reporter, Sophie van Leeuwen, was held for days on spying charges last year and had her media files deleted. Personally, I think Sierra Leone has a problem that is more far reaching than anyone can imagine and in the years to come, we may be witness to its results.
Is It Safe to Visit Sierra Leone Right Now?
For most visitors, I don’t think this story changes the everyday picture much. The violence described targets police, rivals, port staff and anyone seen as a threat to the network. Nothing in the reporting suggests tourists are in the firing line.
But that isn’t the same as saying nothing changes. Check the UK government’s travel advice for Sierra Leone before you go, and again before you fly.
A few practical thoughts, and I’m not a security consultant, so treat these as common sense:
Don’t film convoys, the port or security forces. Don’t ask pointed questions about named individuals in bars and restaurants. Don’t buy cocaine, partly because of the overdose risk and partly because you’d be paying into exactly this system.
If you’re a journalist or researcher, take the van Leeuwen case seriously and tell someone your plans. If you’re an investor, an NGO or a shipper, do real due diligence on any counterparty touching the port.
Is It Spreading Across West Africa?
Intelligence sources told the Guardian the network is expanding. Bases have reportedly been set up in Liberia, Guinea Bissau and Ghana, where several suspected members were arrested last month. In July, Liberia announced its biggest ever drugs bust, almost four tonnes worth £235m, and sources recognised a man arrested over it from Freetown.
In the Netherlands, on 1 September, dozens of armed men attacked a rural warehouse in the village of Overasselt, killing a security guard and wounding two officers. Thirty four were arrested. Police believe it was a panicked response to a lost shipment he wrongly thought a rival had taken.
The pressure is building. Since the Arconian, he’s reportedly lost up to 12 shipments, the wholesale price in Europe has risen from €12,000 to €22,000 a kilo, and police believe he owes the Colombian Cali cartel. His lawyer rejects everything. Dutch special forces were reportedly positioned off the coast twice, but called off the operations.
Rounding Up
The people who suffer most from a story like this are the ones who’ll never appear in it: the driver, the vendor, the young officer who isn’t paid enough to look away. If you’re coming here, come with your eyes open and your curiosity intact. And if you’re deciding what to believe, hold on to the difference between what’s been reported, what’s been denied, and what a court has actually decided.
