On Thursday, the Belgian Federal Prosecution Service announced the seizure of a “record” 11.5 tons of pure cocaine during the dismanting of a criminal organisation, on board a container coming from Guyana.
The drugs were seized in the port of Antwerp and were on their way to the Netherlands. The are valued at around 450 million Euros and will now be destroyed, the prosecution service confirmed.
The discovery was made during an investigation opened in late 2019 by Belgian courts after 2.8 tons of cocaine were seized. The investigation resulted in the break up of an international criminal organisation that was “well-structured and suspected of regularly sending large quantities of cocaine from South America to Belgium.”
On 1 October, around 30 persons were arrested in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain, following 70 searches. 22 of them remain in pre-trial detention and around 3 million Euros have been seized.
On 27 October, investigators inspected five containers of scrap metal. A further steel container was hidden inside one of them, where the 11.5 tons of drugs were discovered.
The prosecutor explained that the drug dealers’ system was very sophisticated. The drugs were very hard to detect inside the second container. Sniffing tests would have failed and only a “high quality special scanner” could have found the drugs.
The seizure has led to five further searches as well as two arrests in Belgium and one in the Netherlands.
This is one of the biggest drug seizures ever made in Europe, as well as a “worldwide record for cocaine seized inside a single container”, as Kristian Vanderwaeren, general administrator of Belgian customs authorities, confirmed to AFP.
