Afghan national Abdul Zahir Qadir when he appeared in a Nairobi court.

📋 Breaking It Down

Investigators in the US have revealed details about an operation in Nairobi that brought down a former Afghan general and senior politician, Abdul Zahir Qadir, after he was linked to an international network of drugs and weapons smuggling.

The details, presented after Gen Qadir was extradited to the US, show that undercover detectives, in collaboration with their Kenyan counterparts, laid a trap in Nairobi for a meeting that was never what the suspect expected it would be.

According to prosecutors in the US, Gen Qadir, a former First Deputy Speaker of Afghanistan’s National Assembly’s House of the People, travelled to Nairobi in April 2025 to meet people he believed were representatives of an international drug-trafficking organisation.

📌 What You Need to Know

Instead, the planned meeting involved confidential sources working under the direction of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Kenyan law enforcement officers arrested him immediately after the meeting.

More than a year later, Gen Qadir, 52, was extradited from Kenya to the US on July 10, 2026, where American prosecutors accuse him of conspiring to import hundreds of kilogrammes of heroin and methamphetamine and arranging the supply of an arsenal of military-grade weapons.

Abdul Zahir Qadir, alias Haji Abdul Zahir, at the Milimani Law Courts on  April 22, 2026, where he lost a legal fight to block his extradition to the US to face drug trafficking charges.

Court documents in the Southern District of New York show that investigators started trailing the general, who is also known as Haji Abdul Zahir, in 2024.

The detectives instructed a confidential source (CS-1) who was known to Gen Qadir to initiate communication about a potential in trafficking heroine and methamphetamine to the US.

“CS-1, who has known Qadir since in or about 2010, has provided information to the DEA in exchange for financial compensation since in or about 2024. Prior to becoming a confidential source with the DEA, CS-1 was previously arrested in another country and charged with fraud, and those charges remain pending. Information provided by CS-1 in this investigation has been found to be reliable,” the court documents state.

📰 Source: Nation Africa