(Reuters) – Police in Guinea-Bissau have seized 2.63 tons of cocaine found on an airplane that arrived from Venezuela in the West African country’s capital, the judicial police said.
Agents confiscated 78 bales of drugs that were smuggled in on a Gulfstream IV aircraft during a raid on Saturday afternoon at Bissau’s Osvaldo Vieira International Airport, the police said in a statement.
The aircraft’s entire crew of five, including the pilot, was arrested. They included two Mexican nationals as well as citizens of Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil.
The detainees will appear before a regional court on Monday for interrogation, the statement said.
Police said the raid, codenamed “Operation Landing”, was carried out in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre-Narcotics.
Drug smugglers often use West African countries as a transit point to ship cocaine from South America to Europe. The seizure at the weekend is one of the biggest recorded in recent years.
Cocaine remains among the most widely used drugs worldwide with 23 million users, according to the 2024 U.N. World Drug Report.
(Reporting by David Lewis and David Latona; Writing by Anait Miridzhanian; Editing by Ros Russell)
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