Customs agents have seized about 93 kilograms (205 pounds). cocaine in the port of the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki from a ship carrying bananas, authorities said, marking yet another discovery of drugs hidden in the tropical fruit.
The cocaine was found on a ship that had sailed from Ecuador to Thessaloniki with 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 agents X-rayed a container and found 80 packages hidden inside the container’s cooling mechanism, said the IAPR in a statement released late Friday, while upload a short video shows officers unloading bricks of the alleged drugs.
“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 continues,” the statement said.
IAPR
The estimated street value of the cocaine was more than 2.9 million euros ($3.16 million), authorities said.
Cocaine has been found hidden in banana shipments several times 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 officials confiscated approx 170 kilos of cocaine from a ship transporting bananas from Ecuador.
The month before that, British authorities said they found more than 12,500 pounds of cocaine hidden in a shipment of the fruit, breaking the record for the largest single seizure of hard drugs in the country.
In August last year, customs agents were seized in the Netherlands 17,600 pounds of cocaine was found hidden in boxes of bananas in the port of Rotterdam. Three months before that, a police dog found 3 tons of cocaine hidden in a box of bananas in the Italian port of Gioia Tauro.
More than half of the cocaine found in the world is produced in Colombia.