ZAGREB, April 5 (Hina) - Croatia's police last December found 661kg of cocaine worth about DM130 million in a container terminal in the northern port of Rijeka. The discovery launched the "international controlled delivery" action
which lasted several months and ended this March with the arrests of four persons in Gambia, Africa.
ZAGREB, April 5 (Hina) - Croatia's police last December found 661kg
of cocaine worth about DM130 million in a container terminal in the
northern port of Rijeka.
The discovery launched the "international controlled delivery"
action which lasted several months and ended this March with the
arrests of four persons in Gambia, Africa.#L#
Top officials in Croatia's Interior Ministry, Croatian Customs,
and workers of the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration of the
United States Department of Justice, briefed the press on the
action in Zagreb on Wednesday.
According to Assistant Interior Minister Dragutin Cestar, the
Rijeka drug confiscation was one of the biggest in Europe last year,
and the biggest ever in Croatia. "That was an international cocaine
smuggling chain in which Croatia was not the final destination," he
said.
Croatia's police have become a respectable fighter against drug
abuse on the international scale, the assistant minister said. We
are greatly indebted to DEA's workers, with whom we directly
collaborated in this case, as well as with the Interpol, he added.
The entire action, called "Salmonida", was initiated by DEA in
Ecuador after learning that a major quantity of cocaine had been
loaded onto a tuna ship container. A non-existent company from
Rijeka was listed as the container's buyer, so Croatian police were
notified about the delivery, said Darko Dundovic, head of the
Croatian Interior Ministry Drug Abuse Prevention Department.
The container was under police surveillance on its entire route, by
ship to Amsterdam and by train to Rijeka. Upon its arrival in the
northern Croatian port on December 24, 600 vacuum-packed packages
of 90 percent pure cocaine were found.
Four packages were left in the container whose destination, across
Italy and Greece, was Valencia, Spain, to catch the buyer.
After the container reached Gambia, the DEA and Gambia's
authorities began an investigation which led to the March 15 arrest
of one British citizen and several other persons, DEA
representative in Vienna Kevin Scully said, adding the arrested
persons were still being identified.
(hina) ha mm