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Drugs

Police Found 800 Pounds of Cocaine Hidden in a Banana Shipment

It's not the first time cops have busted people for hiding drugs in the fruit.
Drew Schwartz
Brooklyn, US
Photo by Flickr user Micolo J

More than constructing giant catapults or using underwater tunnels, drug traffickers often try to get their product across borders using produce. After being known to shove the stuff inside pumpkins, pineapples, fake carrots, and limes, some smugglers recently tried (unsuccessfully) to use bananas to get the job done, the Associated Press reports.

Over the weekend, German police found 847 pounds of coke inside a banana shipment from Ecuador that ended up in a warehouse outside of Cologne. Although the coke wasn't hidden inside the actual fruit, cops found hundreds of packages of the stuff hidden throughout 26 crates, along with a GPS tracker authorities believe was being used to track the shipment.

Weirdly enough, this isn't the first time smugglers have tried to use bananas to sneak coke into a country. Just last month, police in Spain found 15 pounds of coke shoved into more than 50 fake bananas, the AP reports. It's not clear if that shipment was also from Ecuador, but it resulted in the arrest of two Spanish men and one Italian thought to have ties with a criminal organization.

This month's banana-blow shipment almost usurped the record 851 pounds of cocaine cops found in Berlin in 2014, which had been placed in banana shipments from Colombia. That stash ended up at local supermarkets across the city and was the most coke authorities had ever discovered in the German capital.

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