TheCable

A colleague alerted him. Scotland Yard had issued an All Ports Bulletin: a Nigerian had been kidnapped and could be smuggled out of the UK.

Dikko’s secretary, who had seen the abduction from a window in the house, had alerted the police.

Morrow continued: “I just put two and two together. The classic customs approach is not to look for the goods, you look for the space.

“So I am looking out of the window and I can see the space which is these two crates, clearly big enough to get a man inside. We’ve got a Nigerian Airways 707, which we don’t normally see. They don’t want the crates manifested, so there would be no record of them having gone through. And there was very little other cargo going on board the aircraft.

“If you want to hide a tree, you hide it in the forest. You don’t stick it out in the middle of Essex.”

There was a little problem though.

Going by the Vienna Convention, a diplomatic bag is not supposed to be checked. This was being called a diplomatic bag. Morrow immediately called the British Foreign Office.

He said: “To qualify as a ‘diplomatic bag’ they clearly had to be marked with the words ‘Diplomatic Bag’ and they had to be accompanied by an accredited courier with the appropriate documentation. It was fair to say they had a Nigerian diplomat – I’d seen his passport – but they didn’t have the right paperwork and they weren’t marked ‘Diplomatic Bag’.”

The British authorities decided the crates should be opened, but they were now about to be loaded to the aircraft.

He added: “Peter, the cargo manager, hit the lid on the bottom and lifted it. And as he lifted it, the Nigerian diplomat, who was standing next to me, took off like a startled rabbit across the tarmac.

“You have to remember we are on an airfield which is square miles of nothing. He ran about five yards, realised no-one was chasing him and then stopped.

“Peter looked into the crate and said: ‘There’s bodies inside!'”

Morrow quickly called the emergency number.

Morrow

“My name’s Morrow, from Customs at Stansted. We’ve got some bodies in a crate. Do you think you can send someone over,” he recalled to BBC.

“They said: ‘Alive or Dead?’

“I said: ‘That’s a very good point. I don’t know.’

“They said: ‘We’ll send an ambulance as well.'”

Police arrived 30 minutes later, opened the crate and found Dikko, unconscious, lying on his back in the corner. The anaesthetist was wide awake.

“He had no shirt on, he had a heart monitor on him, and he had a tube in his throat to keep his airway open. No shoes and socks and handcuffs around his ankles. The Israeli anaesthetist was in there, clearly to keep him alive,” Morrow said.

The Nigerian intelligence officer and the three Israelis were later sentenced to prison terms by the UK authorities.

In retrospect, it was a worthless mission. All the politicians that were jailed by the Buhari government were released by Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, who launched a coup in August 1985.

Babangida granted Dikko pardon, and the fugitive eventually returned to the country.