Over the weekend, using a regular surveillance aircraft, Italian police off the coast of Sicily recovered over two tonnes of cocaine floating in the Mediterranean Sea. The Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s financial police, said in a statement on Monday that they confiscated cocaine valued at more than 400 million euros (USD 440 million) that they discovered in 70 waterproof bundles floating in the open sea.
According to the police, the meticulous packing of the narcotics was probably done to prevent water intrusion and damage to the cocaine. Authorities also discovered a signalling device that lit up in the water that looked to be using many nets to keep the parcels together.
Italian police seize record-breaking two metric tones of cocaine found floating off the coast of Sicily pic.twitter.com/z3Zo4sTjeN
— RT (@RT_com) April 18, 2023
The narcotics were allegedly dropped at sea by a cargo ship, to be picked up by traffickers and transported to the mainland, where they might be sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. According to authorities, the signalling gadget was probably used to monitor the parcels’ contents.
The Sicilian municipality of Catania’s air and marine authorities gave responding officers cover to recover the narcotics, and officials claimed they are still searching the region for any other shipments. “After bringing the drugs to land, authorities tested the contents of the packages and determined that the white powder inside was indeed cocaine,” Italy’s financial police said.
Terming it to be one of the largest seizures the nation has ever seen, the police added, “The identification and subsequent seizure of a similar quantity of drugs, one of the largest ever carried out in the national territory, prevented the drug from being likely to be recovered by criminal subjects for subsequent illegal marketing in the national territory, which would have yielded very high earnings, in the order of approximately over 400 million euros at retail.”
The discovery comes only a few weeks after New Zealand police in February seized ample cocaine floating in the Pacific Ocean to supply the whole domestic market for 30 years.
Also in 2017, seven crew members were detained by Spanish authorities after they detained more than two tonnes of cocaine from a ship travelling through the Atlantic Ocean.
