Drug bust in Colombia yields large amount of cocaine

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Authorities in Colombia said they seized over 1 metric ton of cocaine disguised as printer ink and bound for Mexico.

The police said officers at Bogota's El Dorado airport were tipped off when a drug-sniffing Labrador named Mona detected the narcotics hidden in 48 boxes of a 1-metric ton cargo shipment bound for a company in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. There were no arrests and police wouldn't say on which airline the illegal cargo shipment had been stashed.

The police said in a statement Monday that as soon as the black powder tested positive for cocaine they alerted their Mexican counterparts leading to the bust of a similar amount of so-called "black cocaine" at Mexico City's airport on a flight that had departed Bogota hours earlier.

Mexico's federal police said told The Associated Press they had no knowledge of a weekend interdiction. A spokesman who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he's not authorized to discuss the operation publicly said the only recent bust matching the characteristics described by Colombian police occurred a week ago when authorities at the Mexico City's airport, acting on an anonymous phoned-in tip, found cocaine camouflaged in 40 sacks of black zinc oxide weighing one ton.

Authorities in Colombia still need to extract the cocaine alkaloid from the toner powder in which it was hidden to determine its final weight.