A US Appeals Court has upheld a ruling against Senator Buruji Kashamu who faces drug charges related to the hit TV show Orange is the New Black.
Chicago prosecutors accuse Kashamu, representing Ogun East Senatorial District at the National Assembly, of heading a heroin trafficking ring in the 1990s.
Kashamu, elected to the Senate on the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) platform in 2015 despite being a fugitive from US justice since 1998, argues that prosecutors want his dead brother instead.
In an April 2015 filing, the 68-year-old asked a district court to prevent his “abduction abroad by US authorities.”
US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents teamed up with Nigeria’s National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) to lay siege to his Lagos home for six days before a Nigerian court ordered them to leave, he claimed.
The US court, however, dismissed the complaint, and the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling Monday.
It said US agents’ attempt to arrest Kashamu in coordination with local authorities would not constitute “an attempted abduction.”
Judge Richard Posner wrote that nothing in the law prevents US agents from “being present when foreign officers are effecting an arrest or from assisting foreign officers who are effecting an arrest.”
A dozen people long ago pleaded guilty in the case, including Piper Kerman, whose memoir was adapted for the Netflix show.
