AMSTERDAM, (Reuters) – Dutch authorities have seized more than a tonne of cocaine hidden among containers of whisky on a cargo shipment from Jamaica, their largest seizure ever from the island nation.
The 1,100 kilos of the drug, with a street value of more than 30 million euros, has already been destroyed. “We’ve had bigger seizures but not from Jamaica,” a spokeswoman for the public prosecutor said.
A special team comprised of seaport police, customs, the financial crimes investigation service and the public prosecutor’s office found the container last week in Rotterdam, Europe’s biggest port, they said in a statement yesterday.
The container was targeted for an in-depth search “based on a risk analysis of customs,” they said, and was immediately identified as suspicious by a drug dog.
Police arrested five men on Monday at the warehouse in Amsterdam where the container was delivered.
The U.S. Justice Department has called Jamaica an “increasingly significant transshipment point” for cocaine from South America, mostly to the United States but also to Europe. The island nation is on a U.S. list of 20 countries singled out as being major production or distribution centres for drugs.
The Netherlands remains one of the primary entry points for cocaine into Europe. British drugs research group DrugScope has said that the Netherlands and Spain, together, account for nearly two-thirds of all European seizures of cocaine.