Customs officers seized about 93 kilograms of cocaine in the port of Thessaloniki in northern Greece aboard a ship carrying bananas, authorities said, marking a new discovery of the drug hidden in the tropical fruit.
The cocaine was found on a ship that had sailed from Ecuador to Thessaloniki carrying bananas, which were then to be delivered overland to Romania by a French company, according to Greece’s Independent Authority for Public Revenue, or IAPR, which oversees customs operations.
Customs officers X-rayed a container and found 80 packages hidden inside the container’s cooling mechanism, the IAPR said in a statement late Friday, while releasing a short video showing officers unloading bricks of the suspected drugs.
“The inspectors immediately seized the drugs and the container and handed the drugs over to the police… the investigation to trace the recipients of the drugs is continuing,” the statement said.
IAPR
The street value of the cocaine is estimated at more than 2.9 million euros ($3.16 million), authorities said.
Cocaine has been found hidden in banana shipments on several occasions around the world in recent months.
In July, police dogs in Ecuador helped find more than six tons of cocaine hidden in a shipment of bananas bound for Germany.
In March, Bulgarian customs confiscated about 170 kilos of cocaine from a ship carrying bananas from Ecuador.
The previous month, British authorities had said they had found more than 12,500 books of cocaine hidden in a shipment of fruit, breaking the record for the country’s largest seizure of hard drugs.
Last August, customs officers in the Netherlands seized 17,600 pounds of cocaine found hidden in banana crates in the port of Rotterdam. Three months earlier, a police dog had found 3 tons of cocaine hidden in a banana crate in the Italian port of Gioia Tauro.
More than half of the cocaine discovered in the world is produced in Colombia.
