Buruji Kashamu Loses Appeal In US Court Over Drug-Related Extradition

FUNSHO AROGUNDADE/with agency reports

A United States Appeals Court has upheld a ruling against Mr. Buruji Kashamu, a Nigerian senator who faces drug charges related to the hit TV show “Orange is the New Black.”

Chicago prosecutors accuse Kashamu of heading a heroin trafficking ring in the 1990s.

But Kashamu, elected in 2015 to represent Ogun East Senatorial District in the national assembly, argues that prosecutors want his dead brother instead.

In an April 2015 filing, Kashamu asked a district court to prevent his “abduction abroad by U.S. authorities.

The court dismissed the complaint, and the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling on Monday.

It said U.S. agents’ attempt to arrest Kashamu in coordination with local authorities would not constitute “an attempted abduction.”

In May 2015, the US Drug Enforcement Administration agents teamed up with NDLEA to lay siege to Kashamu’s Lekki, Lagos mansion for six days in an abduction attempt, before a Nigerian court ordered them to leave.

Kashamu, indicted in a heroin case alongside money launderer turned “Orange Is the New Black” writer Piper Kerman in 1998, sued the Department of Justice in 2015.

He hoped to convince a judge to stop U.S. law enforcement from what he alleged was an imminent plan to team up with his political rivals and “abduct” him in Nigeria.

So he certainly won’t be thrilled that his latest efforts to defeat the U.S. government’s attempts to bring him from Lagos to face justice in a Chicago courtroom were defeated late Monday, when the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision to toss out his lawsuit against the American government.

In Monday’s opinion, U.S. Appellate Court Judge Richard Posner wrote that nothing in the law prevents U.S. agents from “being present when foreign officers are effecting an arrest or from assisting foreign officers who are effecting an arrest.”

Kashamu, who is the basis for the character Kubra Balik in the Netflix show, has always insisted that U.S. prosecutors confused him with his dead brother. He previously beat attempts to extradite him from Britain.

A dozen people long ago pleaded guilty in the case, including Piper Kerman, whose memoir was adapted for the Netflix show.