Sierra Leone made its biggest catch of cocaine on Sunday when it seized 700 kg (1,545 lbs) of the drug on a plane which landed at Lungi international
A passenger plane loaded with 1,540 pounds of cocaine was found abandoned at Sierra Leone's main airport Sunday, police said.Airport officials discovered the craft, which was registered to a South American country, along with a handful of guns apparently left behind by a two-man crew before dawn, said Francis Munu, a police official in the capital.
Munu said police had organized a search party to try to find the pilots of the plane.
With cocaine prices in Europe surging ahead of prices in the United States, drug smugglers in South America are increasingly ferrying cocaine to West Africa, from where it is parceled out to hundreds of individual traffickers who carry it north.
Major seizures have been made in Guinea-Bissau and Ghana, and it is widely believed that other countries along the coast are also being used by drug runners
Sierra Leone made its biggest catch of cocaine on Sunday when it seized 700 kg (1,545 lbs) of the drug on a plane which landed at Lungi international airport,Impoverished West Africa, with its unguarded coastline and sparsely populated interior, has become an important trafficking route for Latin American drug runners into lucrative European markets."It's the biggest catch ever, we weighed the stuff and it is about 700 kilograms," Assistant Inspector General in charge of crime services Francis Munu told Reuters.
"It's worth around 35 million dollars in street value in New York, according to a UNODC estimate," Munu said, referring to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.Munu also said that the police found five automatic rifles and 350 rounds of ammunition on the plane. Information Minister Ibrahim Kargbo said both members of the plane's crew had fled. "It is not yet clear whether they were merely making a transition for fuel or whether they came to land and make a deposit," he said.
Munu said police had organized a search party to try to find the pilots of the plane.
With cocaine prices in Europe surging ahead of prices in the United States, drug smugglers in South America are increasingly ferrying cocaine to West Africa, from where it is parceled out to hundreds of individual traffickers who carry it north.
Major seizures have been made in Guinea-Bissau and Ghana, and it is widely believed that other countries along the coast are also being used by drug runners
Sierra Leone made its biggest catch of cocaine on Sunday when it seized 700 kg (1,545 lbs) of the drug on a plane which landed at Lungi international airport,Impoverished West Africa, with its unguarded coastline and sparsely populated interior, has become an important trafficking route for Latin American drug runners into lucrative European markets."It's the biggest catch ever, we weighed the stuff and it is about 700 kilograms," Assistant Inspector General in charge of crime services Francis Munu told Reuters.
"It's worth around 35 million dollars in street value in New York, according to a UNODC estimate," Munu said, referring to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.Munu also said that the police found five automatic rifles and 350 rounds of ammunition on the plane. Information Minister Ibrahim Kargbo said both members of the plane's crew had fled. "It is not yet clear whether they were merely making a transition for fuel or whether they came to land and make a deposit," he said.
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