A 53-year-old man has been remanded in custody for five days after police seized approximately 104 grammes of cocaine at his home in Paphos district, authorities said on Wednesday.

Officers searched the property at around 5pm on Tuesday under a court warrant.

The man allegedly ran into his yard and threw a black bag into a nearby field.

Officers found the cocaine inside and arrested him.

A subsequent search of the home uncovered a precision scale with cocaine traces, €800 in cash and a wooden utensil bearing traces of the drug.

The man appeared before Paphos District Court on Wednesday, which issued the five-day detention order to facilitate investigations.

The Paphos branch of the Directorate for Combating Organised Crime’s drug squad (Ykan) is continuing its inquiries.

The reality 40 years later is that Congress made the drug penalties permanent law, while drug treatment was left to be determined during annual budget fights.

Just a few years ago, Jos Leijdekkers was a gangster in Antwerp, working for a major drug lord. Today he’s the most powerful man in Sierra Leone, which he’s single-handedly turned into a crucial port in the transatlantic cocaine trade. European authorities haven’t been able to track him down. Can a journalist? Alexander Clapp details Leijdekkers’s remarkable, violent rise to power, while looking for the man himself:

“These kinds of people, we are always seeing them in Africa. They come, they disappear. But the moment we learned who he was, it freaked me out,” a local car-dealer who was one of the first people to sell a motor to Leijdekkers, told me. “I left Sierra Leone after finding out. I became really scared. Not small scared.” Sophie van Leeuwen, a Dutch correspondent for RTL News, told me she “had the strong feeling I was being followed by the secret police” during the first days of a reporting trip she took to Sierra Leone in February 2025. She was arrested outside a villa where Leijdekkers was believed to reside, informed that she had intruded upon a “special security situation”, and questioned for 15 hours. Her camera and computer were searched and scrubbed. The Flemish owner of her hotel was interrogated over her alleged role in seeding a European spy network in Sierra Leone.

One evening in the hills above Freetown I attended a cocktail party where Western diplomats mingled with aid-workers. “Careful with that,” a European mission head told me when I mentioned why I had come to Africa, swivelling her blue eyes round the room. A Norwegian mining investor assured me that there would only be one way of knowing whether I was making progress in my investigation: “The government will arrange a car crash for you.”