Colombian Cocaine: Shipment Valued at 25M Pounds Seized in UK
Plastic bananas hiding cocaine in a shipment of the real fruit were seized at Scotland Yard in the U.K. on Thursday.
The shipment of bananas from Colombia arrived on Thursday, and four men have been arrested in connection with the incident in Kent, according to the BBC.
Officials entered the warehouse based on intelligence from an ongoing investigation and found more than 300 pounds of the drug packed in plastic bananas.
The police surveillance operation saw officers track a truck "from Dover to a warehouse on a trading estate" in Kent, according to the Mirror.
A 46-year-old local man and three Colombian men in the U.K. were arrested that day.
The Colombian men were arrested at an Internet cafe in South London where police said instructions about the drugs were sent.
This is not the first time in recent years that Colombian shipments have been found with stashes of the drug. A similar incident occurred in Berlin in January when more than 300 pounds of cocaine, with a street value of 12 million Euros, was "accidentally" sent to branches of a supermarket chain, according to The Independent.
Police believe that incident was a botched illegal operation.
Tests from that shipment showed the cocaine was about 55 percent pure, but some may have been about 90 percent, according to the Huffington Post.
It was the among the largest reported shipments of cocaine in Germany, according to the BBC.
Another botched operation occurred at a Danish market, where about 220 pounds of the drug was found in boxes, according to Daily Record.
An even larger quantity was smuggled into Russia last year -- about 256 pounds -- in a shipment from Colombia, according to the Huffington Post.
The Russian incident was not as discreet as the plastic bananas, though, as 110 bricks of cocaine were hidden in five boxes of bananas.
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