Liquid cocaine in canned food

KUALA LUMPUR – The authorities are still busy opening some 23,000 cans of canned pineapples and coconut milk, believed to contain 76kg of cocaine worth at least RM22 million (S$8.8 million).

Only 30 per cent of the cargo have been inspected so far, with 384 cans found to contain 200gm of the liquidised drug each.

Federal Narcotics Crime Investigation Department director Comm Datuk Noor Rashid Ibrahim said police had received a tip-off from the US Drug Enforcement Administration that the drug shipment from Guyana, South America, was expected to make a stop in Port Klang en route to Mozambique.

“We decided to work together with the Selangor Customs Department. A day after the ship docked at Port Klang, we boarded it at 2am on Nov 12 to inspect the containers.

“Inside one container, we found 980 boxes of canned processed pineapple and coconut milk,” he told reporters in Bukit Aman here yesterday.

After opening almost 100 cans on the ship and analysing the contents with a portable drug testing kit, the team finally hit pay dirt when one was found positive with cocaine.

The cargo was then seized and handed over to the police forensics and chemistry laboratory.

So far, they found 384 cans with liquidised cocaine inside and did not discount the possibility of discovering more.

A police source said the drug syndicate based in Guyana could be “powerful” as it had the means of packing the drugs into cans and the even more sophisticated technique of mixing cocaine with other liquid.

“The syndicate probably has some kind of special marking on the boxes with cocaine. But because we don’t have that information, we have to go through the time-consuming process of opening and inspecting every can,” said the source.

It is learnt that the cargo was to have been transferred to another ship in Port Klang before continuing its journey to Mozambique, where some sort of distillation technique would be used to extract the cocaine.

Each can was labelled with printed information that it was manufactured in Guyana and weighed about 400gm. The cans with cocaine had about 200gm of the liquidised drug.

Comm Noor Rashid said Interpol and all relevant international drug monitoring agencies had been notified of the seizure.

Investigations, he said, were now under way in both the originating and destination countries.

Source: The Star/Asia News Network

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