High tide! Italy police find $440 million worth of cocaine floating at sea
Almost 2 tonnes of cocaine with a market value of more than $440 million (400 million euros) were found floating at sea off eastern Sicily, in what Italy's tax and customs police on Monday (17 April) called a record seizure.
The drugs were stored in about 70 waterproof packages, carefully sealed, held together by fishermen's nets and equipped with a luminous signalling device, the Guardia di Finanza said in a statement.
The "peculiar packaging methods and the presence of a luminous device to allow tracking" suggest the haul was dumped at sea by a cargo ship in order for it to be recovered later, the statement added.
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Monday's seizure compared with the 20 tonnes of cocaine that Italian police managed to intercept over the whole of 2021, its anti-drugs unit said in figures released last June, stressing that was the highest yearly amount on record.
Cocaine seizures increased more than five-fold from 3.6 tonnes in 2018, police noted at the time, describing Italy as a key transit route for the cocaine trade, and where Balkan criminal gangs were consolidating their positions.
"Congratulations to the Guardia di Finanza for this extraordinary operation: (I am) against all drugs and for life, no matter what", Deputy Prime Minister and Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini tweeted on Monday.
($1 = 0.9110 euros)
