Cocaine worth more than $3 million seized from boat carrying bananas in Greece
Customs agents have seized around 93 kilograms (205 pounds) of cocaine at the port in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki from a ship carrying bananas, authorities said, marking yet another discovery of drugs concealed in the tropical fruit.
The cocaine was found on a vessel that had sailed from Ecuador to Thessaloniki carrying bananas, which would then be delivered over land 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, IAPR said in a statement released late Friday, while posting a short video showing officers unloading bricks of the alleged drugs.
"Inspectors immediately impounded the drugs and the container and handed over the drugs to the police ... the investigation to track down the recipients of the drugs continues," the statement said.
The estimated street value of the cocaine was more than 2.9 million euros ($3.16 million), authorities said.
Cocaine has been found concealed in banana shipments several times across the globe in recent months.
In July, police dogs in Ecuador helped find more than six tons of cocaine hidden in a banana shipment headed to Germany.
In March, Bulgarian customs officials confiscated about 170 kilograms 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 biggest single seizure of hard drugs in the country.
Last August, customs agents in the Netherlands seized 17,600 pounds of cocaine found hidden inside crates of bananas in Rotterdam's port. Three months before that, a police dog found 3 tons of cocaine stashed in a case of bananas in the Italian port of Gioia Tauro.
More than half of the cocaine found in the world is produced in Colombia.