Drug smuggling error sees cocaine shipment hit supermarket shelves: Spain

Drug smuggling error sees cocaine shipment hit supermarket shelves



By Fiona Govan in Madrid
Published: 5:05PM GMT 05 Jan 2010

A worker at the Lidl supermarket discovered a brick of the drug as he unloaded boxes of the fruit at a store in Madrid on Saturday morning.

Police spent the weekend searching Lidl stores across the Madrid region where trained sniffer dogs discovered at least 25 packages of the class A drug with a combined street value of around £2 million.


Police sources said they believe up to 100 kgs of the drug were distributed to stores across Madrid and possibly the rest of Spain following an "error" on the part of traffickers.

It is thought that triffickers were supposed to have collected their consignment from the boxes of bananas when they reached port and before they were sent out to supermarkets.

The shipment of bananas arrived in the Port of Sagunto in Valencia on Spain's south-eastern coast from Ecuador via Ivory Coast. The boxes of fruit were collected from a warehouse by the wholesale company Mercamadrid for distribution across Spain.

Stashing cocaine in batches of exotic produce has become a favoured method of smuggling drugs into Spain.

Last week Spain's interior ministry announced it had seized one of the biggest ever drug hauls when police intercepted two tons of cocaine hidden beneath a consignment of cut flowers imported from Colombia.

There is no suggestion the supermarket chain had any knowledge of the illicit shipment of bananas. Lidl said it had removed the fruit from sale while police investigated the case.