DEA Administrator Michele M. Leonhart and Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced today the unsealing of charges against ANTONIO INDJAI, the head of the Guinea-Bissau Armed Forces, for conspiring to provide aid to the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia (the “FARC”), a South American paramilitary group long designated by the United States as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (“FTO”), by storing FARC-owned cocaine in West Africa; conspiring to sell weapons, including surface-to-air missiles to be used to protect FARC cocaine processing operations in Colombia against U.S. military forces; and conspiring to import narcotics into the United States; INDJAI has been the subject of a United Nations travel ban since May 2012 as a result of his alleged participation in the April 2012 coup d’état in Guinea-Bissau.

INDJAI’s co-conspirators Manuel Mamadi Mane and Saliu Sisse were apprehended in a West African Country on April 4, 2013, and thereafter transferred to the custody of the United States and transported to the Southern District of New York for prosecution. Co-conspirators Rafael Antonio Garavito-Garcia and Gustavo Perez-Garcia were apprehended in Colombia on April 5, pursuant to Interpol Red Notices, and remain in Colombia pending extradition to the United States. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff.

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