Katherine Brook
THREE people have been arrested for attempting to smuggle 450kg of cocaine into Spain from Brazil.
A container, which is believed to have been en route to Valencia, was searched five days after it entered Spain, at the port of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
A team of Guardia Civil, National Police, and Customs Surveillance, were brought in to investigate and the offenders were arrested.
It is thought that the three people in question had been trying to recover the drugs, which were concealed in the container.
This is one of a series of busts in which large amounts of cocaine have been seized recently.
Earlier this month, a drug trafficking gang was caught trying to smuggle 300kg of cocaine, disguised as charcoal, into Europe.
In a joint investigation by Spain’s National Police and Portugal’s Judicial Police, the forces uncovered a gang who were bringing in the class A substance from South America after processing it to make it black and odourless.
“The modus operandi involved using a complex chemical process to camouflage the drugs as charcoal, a process that was carried out by the Mexican and Colombian cartels who supplied the alleged kingpin,” the Spanish police said in a statement.
“The drug became almost undetectable because its shape and colour was so similar to that of charcoal. Furthermore, the characteristic smell of cocaine had been eliminated, meaning it couldn’t be detected by specialist narcotics dogs.”
The gang then hid the disguised cocaine lumps among 1,364 sacks of real charcoal in a shipment sent to the Portuguese coast and then transferred to lorry and driven across to Spain.
Police moved in as the cargo arrived at an industrial estate outside Medina del Campo in Castilla y Leon where the gang had a laboratory to process the cocaine.
Some 862 kg were seized and three people arrested including a well-known Basque drug trafficker who had spent time in jail in Bolivia.
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