Drug-sniffing dogs found a half-ton of cocaine hidden in
machinery marked for shipment to Nigeria, customs police announced Friday.
The cocaine was tightly packed into 490
brightly colored bricks and stuffed into heavy dredging equipment being flown
from the international airport in Buenos Aires to an oil company in Lagos,
Nigeria, said Maria Siomara Ayeran, the director-general of Argentina's customs
agency.
Something smelled funny, and not just
to Tota and Gala, the agency's drug-sniffing dogs.
Ayeran said the company in Africa
doesn't exist, and the exporter was under such suspicion that all its shipments
are exhaustively searched.
Once the dogs marked the spot, officers
opened up the machinery late Thursday and found 536 kilos of pure cocaine
inside thick walls of lead and steel, Ayeran said. She said it was most likely
intended for the streets of Europe, where it would be worth nearly $25 million.
Ayeran said it's the first time the
Argentine government has confiscated such a large shipment of cocaine being
smuggled by air from Buenos Aires to Nigeria.
"Today the link with Africa is a
new route that they are exploiting and is in development," she said.
The customs agency said the suspects
were known to investigators and the case was handed over to a judge who ordered
six pre-dawn raids to accumulate more evidence. Officials said the identities
of the people and companies involved could not be released because the case was
being kept sealed while under investigation.