The 3.2-tonne consignment intercepted hundreds of kilometers off the New Zealand coast was enough to meet the country’s demand for 30 years.
In the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There it was, in dozens of packages floating on the water, the impressive cocaine cache detected this Wednesday by the New Zealand police which, if it had gone on the market, would have satisfied the demand for this substance in the country for more than “thirty years.” years”. The amount found weighed 3.2 tons and in circulation would have reached a value close to 316 million dollars (about 294 translated into euros). It is the “major illicit drug discovery” made by the New Zealand services.
Those in charge of moving the cocaine, which was divided into 81 packages, took care to camouflage it so that it would not be detected. Unsuccessful, in view of the result. The drug was attached to a net and covered in yellow corks, and had been placed at a “floating transit point” in the Pacific Ocean, where traffickers would have had to retrieve it. “We thought it was destined for Australia,” said New Zealand Police Chief Andrew Coster, who insisted that the amount found “is more” than the country would use in three decades.
The cache was intercepted by a navy ship as the drugs drifted hundreds of miles northwest of New Zealand. The ‘Five eyes’ alliance -the intelligence collaboration network that makes up this country together with Australia, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom- helped with its information on the location to find the cocaine within an operation that, Coster has recognized , “deals a major financial blow to South American producers and distributors.” The police chief, yes, has assumed that it is still early to determine the origin of the packages.
The discovery made this Wednesday is the largest of cocaine recorded in New Zealand where, not once, but several times, bales of this substance have been found on its beaches. In the summer of 2019, for example, almost twenty packages -worth about 2 million euros- appeared in Bethells Beach, west of Auckland. Then, the neighbors gave the alert voice.
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