Two tons of cocaine, worth about 438 million dollars (almost two billion Colombian pesos), were discovered in waterproof packages floating in the Mediterranean near Sicily, Italian police reported Monday.
Nearly 70 packages, hermetically sealed, with 1,600 bars of cocainewere located and recovered off the east coast of the Mediterranean island.
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The Italian Finance Guard (border police) found this Monday dozens of packages with a total of 2,000 kilos of cocaine floating in the sea off the Sicilian city of Catania (south), a stash that is equivalent to 400 million euros on the market.
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It is “one of the largest drug seizures made in national territory“, the customs police said in a press release.
The discovery occurred during a routine control of the eastern coast of Sicily, when the aircraft of the body identified from the air numerous packed white packages floating in the sea linked by a network.
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The bales in addition They had a light signaling system. to allow its location by eventual recipients, although the police arrived before deploying several ships.
Once seized, the packages have been examined in Catania and the authorities They confirmed that they contained cocaine. Specifically, there were 70 bales with “almost” two thousand kilos of drugs.
The Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, congratulated the agents for this operation. According to the researchers, “the drug was probably thrown into the sea by a freighter to be successively recovered and transported to the mainland”.
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Drug trafficking in Europe is largely controlled by the ‘Ndrangheta, the powerful Calabrian mafiawhich uses versatile intermediaries to introduce cocaine into Europe Europol calculates that the annual retail cocaine market in the old continent represents between 7,600 and 10,500 million euros (between 8,300 million and 11,500 million dollars).
Santiago Andres Venera Salazar
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With information from AFP and EFE
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