Nigeria's National Drug Law Enforcement Agency revealed that it had arrested an alleged Mexican drug kingpin at Lagos international airport last month as he tried to leave the country, and that the arrest had led officers to a suspected industrial-scale methamphetamine laboratory — the third such find allegedly linked to Mexican nationals in four months. Officials said that when Arturo Carrera Loaiza, 40, was detained they found digital images of him wearing what they believed to be a laboratory coat alongside equipment consistent with meth production. Location data embedded in the pictures took investigators to a property in Ebonyi state, where chemicals and drug-making equipment were recovered along with a CCTV memory card whose footage showed a man resembling Loaiza in a blue laboratory coat and a Nigerian man directing others as they cleared chemicals and equipment from the site. Further intelligence led officers to an isolated house in a neighbouring community, where they seized chemicals, dehydrators, condensers, a reaction pot, weighing scales, mixers, drums, gas burners and a sieve containing traces of methamphetamine. No estimate has yet been given of how much the alleged laboratory could produce. Loaiza denied any involvement in methamphetamine production and said a local contact had invited him to Nigeria for a restaurant business venture. Investigators alleged that he had recruited and brought a fellow Mexican to work at another suspected laboratory hidden in forest in Oyo state, raided in June, after which four Nigerians were arrested; a month before that, officers detained three Mexican nationals and seven Nigerians at a similar industrial-scale site elsewhere in the country. Gen Mohamed Buba Marwa, the agency's chairman, said the pattern showed international criminal groups trying to establish production facilities in Nigeria's forests and rural communities. Because a synthetic drug needs only the right chemicals and expertise rather than particular growing conditions, production can be relocated and scaled quickly, and West Africa's swathes of forested land offer secluded sites. The agency said its inquiry into the network, including those who financed or facilitated it, was continuing.