A Fort Liberty Army officer, Kojo Owusu Dartey, has been found guilty of smuggling weapons to West Africa. This comes along him lying to a grand jury. Dartey, 42, faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison when he is sentenced in July 2024. The jury convicted him of several charges as he was arraigned before the courts. The charges include dealing in firearms without a license, delivering firearms without notice to the carrier, smuggling goods from the United States, illegally exporting firearms without a license, making false statements to a U.S. agency, making false declarations before the court, and conspiracy.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, between June 28 and July 2, 2021, Dartey purchased seven firearms at Fort Liberty and asked a U.S. Army staff sergeant at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to purchase three firearms there and send them to Dartey in North Carolina. Dartey hid the firearms, including multiple handguns, an AR15, 50-round magazines, suppressors, and a combat shotgun, in blue barrels. These barrels contained rice and household goods. He smuggled the barrels out of Baltimore, Maryland, on a container ship to the Port of Tema in Ghana.

Ghanaian officials recovered the firearms and reported the seizure to the DEA attache in Ghana. They also made a report to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Baltimore. Dartey was also accused of lying on the stand about his sexual relationship with a defense witness while serving as a witness in the trial of U.S. v. Agyapong. The case involved a marriage fraud scheme between soldiers on Fort Liberty and foreign nationals from Ghana.