SOFIA, Aug 18 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A warehouse employee has found 75kg of cocaine hidden amongst bananas shipped from Ecuador to Bulgaria’s Black Sea port of Burgas, prosecutors and police said.
The drug have been packed in bricks wrapped up in steel foil and hidden contained in the cargo of 20,626 containers of bananas, Burgas regional prosecutor Georgy Chinev told journalists at the warehouse of the InterCitrus fruit distribution firm.
A warehouse employee stumbled on the 5kg packages on Saturday morning and alerted police, police chief Kaloyan Kaloyanov said.
Officers disclosed that the fruit arrived at Burgas on July 27 on a ship from Ecuador that additionally made a stopover in Italy.
Authorities shall be checking different warehouses of the identical fruit firm in Sofia, Varna and Plovdiv within the coming days, they said, recalling that a number of the bananas had already been exported to Romania.
Romania and Bulgaria are key transit factors for cocaine from Latin America on the smuggling path to western Europe.
Kaloyanov said that this has been the biggest seizure in Burgas this 12 months.
Comparable finds of cocaine in banana shipments from South and Central America have been made in a number of European international locations over the previous 12 months, together with Ukraine, Poland and Spain. — NNN-AGENCIES
