Italian police detect cocaine hidden in banana shipment from Ecuador

With the help of a high-jumping dog trained to detect cocaine, Italian police seized more than 2,700 kilograms of the drug hidden among 70 tons of bananas packed in boxes from Ecuador, authorities said Tuesday.

Had the drugs reached their final destination in Armenia, it would have earned traffickers more than 800 million euros ($900 million) in street sales, police estimated. He described the cocaine as of the highest quality.

Customs police became suspicious of two containers on a cargo ship that recently arrived at the port of Gioia Tauro on the Italian mainland and which is a stronghold of a “drangheta”, as organized crime groups are known locally.

Documents and a background check indicated the banana shippers were not in the business of moving so much fruit, police told Italian state radio.

Agents used scanning machines and the dog, named Joel, to uncover packages of cocaine hidden in crates stacked several feet high on container trucks.

The police Joel recounted jumped high and excited when the policemen opened the back doors of a truck and furiously dug into some unloaded boxes as if trying to push bananas aside.

Had the drug traffickers evaded detection, the containers would have continued their journey across the Mediterranean to a Black Sea port in Georgia for final transport to Armenia, authorities said.

They did not specify when the container ship arrived in Gioia Tauro, but customs police said that days before the seizure, their agents at the same port found some 600 kilos (1,320 pounds) of cocaine in six container trucks also loaded with fruit from Ecuador. .

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