Police dogs sniff out over 6 tons of cocaine hidden in banana shipment headed for Europe

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Police dogs in Ecuador helped find more than six tons of cocaine hidden in a banana shipment headed to Germany, officials announced this week, marking yet another major seizure of drugs concealed alongside the tropical fruit.

National police were carrying out a routine inspection of banana export containers at the Deep Water Maritime Port in Posorja when sniffer dogs alerted officers to the presence of narcotics, the prosecutor-general's office said in a news release Monday. Officials opened the containers and ultimately found 5,630 brick-shaped packages hidden under the fruit, totaling 6.23 tons of cocaine.

The shipment was destined for Germany, officials said, and had a street value of $224 million. Five people were arrested following the discovery, according to the prosecutor-general's office, which released an image of the drugs alongside gun-toting officers and two police dogs. Some of the bricks of cocaine featured a "911" logo on the front.

One of the people arrested was a representative of the export company responsible for the shipment, who was present at the inspection and gave officials the names of the four other suspects, officials said. Also detained were the managers of the banana plantation where the cocaine is suspected to have been added to the shipment, as well as the driver who took the container to the port.

Ecuador has become a major transit hub for cocaine produced in neighboring Colombia, with criminal gangs using Ecuador's ports to ship the drug to Europe and the U.S., according to BBC News. Earlier this year, Ecuadorian officers found 22 tons of cocaine buried in a pig farm -- the largest stash ever to be seized in the country.

Last year, more than 200 tons of drugs, most of it cocaine, were seized by security forces in Ecuador, the BBC reported. Only the U.S. and Colombia seized more drugs in 2023.

Drugs have been found concealed in banana shipments across the globe, most recently in February when British authorities said they had found more than 12,500 pounds of cocaine hidden in a shipment of the fruit, breaking the record for the biggest single seizure of hard drugs in the country.

Last August, customs agents in the Netherlands seized 17,600 pounds of cocaine found hidden inside crates of bananas in Rotterdam's port. Three months before that, a police dog found 3 tons of cocaine stashed in a case of bananas in the Italian port of Gioia Tauro.

In:
• Cocaine
• Ecuador

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith is a managing editor for CBSNews.com based in New York. A Washington, D.C. native, Steve was previously an editorial producer for the Washington Post, and has also worked in Los Angeles, Boston and Tokyo.

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