In a move that is being seen as a means to discredit the reputable Reuters news agency, the government of Sierra Leone through the Ministry of Information, has denied all knowledge of the person of wanted drug smuggling fugitive from the Dutch authorities Jos Leijdekkers being present in Sierra Leone.
Sierra Leone once again made international news of ill-repute less than a week after the Conakry Affair when news agency Reuters and Dutch authorities working from a picture that was taken on 1st January, 2025 at Tihun, the hometown or village of president Julius Maada Bio, that features the president sitting three rows in front of Jos, who was reportedly at the New Year’s Day church ceremony in the company of the president’s daughter, Agnes, alleged to be his wife.
However, in a move that is yet to make the government lose much international stock, the Ministry of Information has boldly denied that the government and especially the president had any knowledge of the presence of Leijdekkers in Sierra Leone or that he is a wanted fugitive from the law in The Netherlands.
But the Reuters story is solid and based on irrefutable evidence that the man pictured in the social media published event from Tihun on New Year’s Day is the wanted and notorious drug smuggling and money laundering flying Dutch and much sought after criminal, Jos Leijdekkers.
For the government of Sierra Leone to now come out saying that the president attended many family occasions where pictures were taken by attendees, which the president had no idea of, is trying to smear Reuter’s reputation that has been built through arduous and painstaking work in some of the most dangerous places for journalists to work.
According to Wikipedia, Reuters is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters that employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide writing in 16 languages. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world. The agency was established in London in 1851 by the German baron Paul Reuter. It was acquired by the Thomson Corporation of Canada in 2008, which merged to form the Thomson Reuters Corporation. In December 2024, Reuters was ranked as the 27th most visited news site in the world, with over 105 million monthly readers.
Paul Julius Reuter worked at a book-publishing firm in Berlin and was involved in distributing radical pamphlets at the beginning of the Revolutions of 1848. These publications brought much attention to Reuter, who in 1850 developed a prototype news service in Aachen using homing pigeons and electric telegraphy from 1851 on, in order to transmit messages between Brussels and Aachen, in what today is Aachen’s Reuters House.
Reuter moved to London in 1851 and established a news wire agency at the London Royal Exchange. Headquartered in London, Reuter’s company initially covered commercial news, serving banks, brokerage houses, and business firms. The first newspaper client to subscribe was the London Morning Advertiser in 1858, and more began to subscribe soon after.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “the value of Reuters to newspapers lay not only in the financial news it provided but in its ability to be the first to report on stories of international importance.”
It was the first to report Abraham Lincoln‘s assassination in Europe, for instance, in 1865.
According to Reuters, Leijdekkers, who is Dutch, was sentenced in absentia to 24 years in prison on June 25 by a Rotterdam court for smuggling more than 7 tonnes of cocaine. Dutch police have said he was believed to be living in Turkey until recently. A spokesperson for the Dutch prosecutors’ office told Reuters on Friday in response to questions about his whereabouts that he has been living in Sierra Leone for at least six months. Two of the sources with knowledge of the situation said Leijdekkers had been in Sierra Leone since at least early 2023.
The videos and photos of a church mass in Sierra Leone on Jan. 1, 2025 show Leijdekkers, 33, sitting two rows behind Sierra Leone’s President Julius Maada Bio, next to a woman. Reuters identified Leijdekkers by using five different facial recognition tools to compare the man at the church, as seen in a video and images on Facebook and in another video on YouTube, with photos of Leijdekkers released by Europol in 2022. The tools all determined they were a match, ranging between 82 – 98% confidences.
The three sources said the woman was Bio’s daughter Agnes and that Leijdekkers was married to her. Reuters could not confirm the relationship. Agnes Bio did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent to her email and her social media accounts. The mass was held at St Joseph’s Catholic Church in the president’s hometown of Tihun, in southern Sierra Leone.
Reuters is not a fly-by-night news organization that is easily swayed by Le1 million from the government to start singing a new song and disregard the obvious truth. This is an organization that is dedicated to the truth, come what may: jail term or praises.
Trying to sound as if it will address the issue of the wanted drug dealing fugitive that is rumoured to enjoy high level protection from a regime that has just been let out the closet as a drug dealing and smuggling and money laundering criminal enterprise (something for which Leijdekkers is known to have written the book), the Ministry of Information said although no formal request has been made from Dutch prosecutors (check the Europol – Interpol connection) regarding the wanted fugitive, the Sierra Leone Police is still committed to work with their Dutch counterparts.
How this will work out when the government main news agency has denied all knowledge of Jos being in town is yet to be seen.
The work of the government’s bloggers or content creators has also come under great scrutiny. It was the same content creators who first broadcasted the media event at Tihun who didn’t know this man’s reputation or identity but wanting to show white people at the president’s attended events that published the picture that caught the attention of the Dutch authorities, who have reportedly also identified Leijdekkers that our government is now trying to distance itself from.
However, members of the public have called for the resignation of the Minister of Information for how this embarrassing piece of information has so far been handled. In the midst of what happened in Conakry and now the identification of Jos a few meters from the president for the Minister of Information to promise to combat transnational crime, including drugs, arms and human trafficking and all forms of terrorism and promising that Sierra Leone will not become a safe haven for any organised crime has been seen as a smack in the face of the people and the image of the country to the international community.
“Really, all Bah and the regime could have done was say we don’t or didn’t know this man as Jos Leijdekkers, put some sort of media spin on it. But to outright deny knowledge of Jos being within reach of the president and head of state at an intimate event at the president’s remote home village is too much of a coincidence for it to be considered as such. This man was there next to the president’s daughter, who could have chosen to sit with the first family but chose to sit next to this man that the ministry and obviously the intelligence and secret service knew nothing about. Is this what the ministry of information and their content creators and their supporters in the Sierra Leone news media are trying to say? With all the facial recognition that is out there that is as certain as DNA testing, the Dutch authorities are saying this is their wanted criminal citizen that the Sierra Leone government is denying having any knowledge of.
Let us assume that they didn’t, but now with the Reuters story for them to now want to deny this, using cheap public relations spin, should get the minister of info sacked for trying to play the people for fools and making a mockery of our local investigative techniques and capabilities. You cannot spin a story like this a week after the Conakry drugs and money event. Reuters is a reputable news agency serving humanity for over 150 years. No news media or government ministry can mess with the reputation of Reuters’ investigative news stories,” stated the publisher of a medium critical of government’s excesses.