Police in Spain and Portugal have been monitoring smugglers for a year and a half and learned about a new way to mask cocaine.
Cocaine disguised as charcoal and devoid of its characteristic smell was supplied to Europe. The police investigated the case for a year and a half after which they detained three people and blocked the supply channel.
This was announced on Wednesday, June 2, The Guardian reports.
Police in Spain and Portugal launched an investigation in early 2020, noting that the trading company was using various front organizations to carry out suspicious imports. They traced the origins of this business back to a famous Basque drug dealer.
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Close surveillance then led the Portuguese authorities to the port, where cocaine was found in the contents of two containers of charcoal.
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.
Spanish police said.
They also noted that the dealers have learned to hide the drug, making it unrecognizable.
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 picked up be specialist narcotics dogs.
said law enforcement officers.
The officers found 30 bags of “cocaine charcoal” among 1,364 bags of real charcoal.
Fifty Spanish and Portuguese officers tracked the two containers as they were trucked from Portugal to northern Spain, where the contents were to be separated and the cocaine retrieved in a laboratory.
As soon as the trucks arrived at the base of a criminal group in an industrial area in the Castile and Leon region, the police arrived, arrested three people and seized 862 kg of cocaine.
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The police noted that during the operation they not only arrested a large consignment of drugs and detained drug dealers, but also revealed a new way to hide drugs.
Image Credit: Policia Nacional