(Madrid) Spanish customs announced Monday that they had intercepted eight tons of cocaine in the port of Algeciras, a cargo hidden in a container coming from Latin America and which constitutes one of the largest seizures made in the country.
The drug was hidden inside a metal structure made from a special alloy intended to deceive the authorities’ scanner, so that only the shape of the product shown on the slip appeared in the image, namely a generator, explains the customs service in a press release.
Customs specify that this is the first time they have encountered this method.
Despite this rigging, the scanner detected “a large quantity of merchandise” which occupied almost all the space of the metal structure located in the container and which turned out to be “cocaine of great purity” for a weight total of eight tons.
The seizure “is among the largest carried out in Spain in recent years”, underlines the press release.
The person who was supposed to receive the drugs in Spain was arrested.
The container came from Suriname, Latin America, and had stopped in Panama.
This new seizure confirms, once again, that Spain is one of the main points of entry for drugs into Europe, due both to its links with Latin America, where the cocaine comes from , and its proximity to northern Africa, where cannabis is produced, also at the center of intense trafficking.
In this regard, two civil guards were killed on Friday evening when the zodiac in which they were traveling was hit by a speedboat used by a gang of drug traffickers whom they were pursuing in the port of Barbate, some 70 kilometers from Algeciras . Eight people were arrested.
The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, assured Monday that the government of socialist Pedro Sánchez “(would) continue to invest as much as necessary” to “fight against drug trafficking” in the Strait of Gibraltar.
He also repeated that he did not intend to “resign”, as the right and the far right have demanded, echoing several police unions which criticize the minister for not giving the security forces order sufficient means to combat drug trafficking.