Record Record, Police Find Cocaine Worth IDR 6.4 Trillion Floating In The Sea

Guardia Finanza. (Wikimedia Commons/Perergiuliano Chesi)

JAKARTA - Nearly two tonnes of cocaine with a market value of more than 400 million euros (IDR 6,493,998,792,000), were found floating in eastern Sicily's high seas, in what Italian tax and customs police on Monday called record confiscations.

The drugs were kept in about 70 waterproof packages, carefully sealed, combined with fishing nets and equipped with a luminous signaling device, Guardia said in Finanza in a statement.

"The strange packaging method and the presence of a luminous device to allow tracking" suggest that the catch was thrown into the sea by a cargo ship for later re-take, the statement added.

Monday's seizure compared to 20 tonnes of cocaine that Italian police managed to intercept throughout 2021, the anti-drug unit said in a figure released last June, stressing that it was the highest annual number ever recorded.

It is known that the seizure of cocaine increased more than five times from 3.6 tonnes in 2018, police said at the time, describing Italy as the main transit route for the cocaine trade, and where the Balkan criminal gangs consolidated their positions.

"Congratulations to Guardia in Finanza for this extraordinary operation: (I) oppose all drugs and for life, whatever happens," Deputy Prime Minister and Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini said on Twitter on Monday.