Two British teenagers arrested for drugs in Gh

ACCRA, July 12 (Reuters) Two British teenage girls face possible jail sentences in Ghana after they were arrested at Accra airport allegedly carrying 609,500 dollars worth of cocaine in laptop bags, officials said today.

The two 16-year-olds, whose names were not immediately released, were detained by Ghanaian Narcotic Control Board officers on July 2.

''They were carrying drugs from Ghana to Britain. It was cocaine. It was in laptop bags. The laptops had been removed.

They put 3 kg in each bag,'' Mark Ewuntomah, the board's deputy executive secretary, told Reuters.

The girls were expected to be formally charged by a Ghanaian juvenile court.

''The charges are possessing narcotic drugs and attempting to export drugs. The minimum sentence is 10 years,'' Ewuntomah said.

Gordon Wetherell, British High Commissioner in Accra, told Sky News: ''Given their age, I don't want to go into any details about them. I don't think it would be right to go into details of their circumstances.'' The arresting officers were part of Operation Westbridge, a project set up by Britain and Ghana to tackle drug smugglers using Accra airport as a gateway to Britain and the European mainland.

''The use of such young girls as couriers vividly illustrates the ruthlessness of the criminal drug gangs involved in this traffic,'' said Tony Walker, the British official who heads Operation Westbridge.

UN, US and European drugs experts have recently sounded the alarm over what they say is the increasing use of West Africa as a transhipment route by Latin American cocaine cartels supplying markets in Europe and elsewhere.

After recent big seizures in Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania and Senegal, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has been trying to improve coordination with West African police forces to try to close down these drug smuggling channels.

Experts say West Africa's often inaccessible and unsupervised coastline, ranging from deserted Saharan beaches in the north to mangrove creeks and river deltas further south, allows drugs traffickers to set up clandestine airstrips, embarkation points and storage depots.

This, combined with weak and often corrupt local police forces, has made West Africa vulnerable to international traffickers, although US and European anti-narcotics agencies are moving to fight back with assistance to local authorities.

REUTERS AM BST0012