The foiled Nigerian kidnap plot
"My name's Morrow from Customs at Stansted. We've got some bodies in a crate” - Charles Morrow UK Customs official
In London in 1984, a team of Nigerians and Israelis attempted to kidnap and repatriate the exiled former Nigerian minister Umaru Dikko. Mr Dikko, who had fled Nigeria after a military coup, was accused of stealing $1bn (£625m) of government money.
The drugged ex-minister was put in a crate and taken to an airport where a plane was waiting
The plot was foiled by a young British customs officer, Charles David Morrow, who has now told the BBC World Service Witness programme what happened.
On a summer's day, Mr Dikko walked out of his front door in an upmarket neighbourhood of Bayswater in London. Within seconds he had been grabbed by two men and bundled into the back of a transit van.
"I remember the very violent way in which I was grabbed and hurled into a van, with a huge fellow sitting on my head - and the way in which they immediately put on me handcuffs and chains on my legs," he told the BBC a year later.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20211380