The International Police has arrested a Nigerian alleged to be running a human trafficking ring from Ghana, Togo, Benin to Nigeria.
The Nigerian, who was not named, was intercepted by officers in Ghana.
The suspect had been placed under a Red Notice by Spain during an operation against cross-border crimes.
He was caught when the officers conducted a check on a passenger manifest during an operation tagged, “Smuggling Training and Operations Programme.”
A statement from the Interpol website reads: “Operation STOP (Smuggling Training and Operations Program) included training provided to 20 frontline officers to optimize the use of INTERPOL’s policing capabilities – including its criminal and stolen and lost travel documents databases – to better track the movement of criminals and identify potential victims.
“After the training session, officers from various enforcement services including aviation security, customs, immigration, narcotics and Ghana’s INTERPOL National Central Bureau were deployed to Accra Airport where they carried out almost 33,000 checks against INTERPOL’s databases.
“In this respect, the detection from a passenger manifest of a Nigerian national wanted internationally under a Red Notice issued by Spain on human trafficking charges further underlined the role of INTERPOL’s policing tools to help secure borders by identifying wanted individuals.
“The hit on the Spanish Red Notice was generated by checking names and passports against INTERPOL’s databases using I-Batch, an application that processes bulk data from passenger manifests in a very short time.”
Apart from the Nigerian suspect, 286 human trafficking suspects were also arrested worldwide by the global agency in July.