New Zealand authorities have recovered 3.2 tonnes of cocaine, worth further than$ 300 million, set up floating in the Pacific Ocean and believed to be bound for Australia. Police said the haul of 81 bales, which was drifting hundreds of kilometres northwest of New Zealand, was recovered in a common operation with the New Zealand Customs Service and Defence Force acting on intelligence from the Five Eyes alliance, which also includes Australia, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
New Zealand Customs Service acting regulator Bill Perry said the 81 bales of cocaine seized “is estimated to have taken further than half a billion worth” of the medicine out of rotation. The haul was made possible by the intelligence sharing between the “Five Eyes” alliance. A police print showed the massive haul was bound by netting and covered in unheroic docks. Some of the bales had a Batman symbol on them, with the packages of cocaine inside labelled with what appeared to be a print of a four- splint clover. The network, which is several decades old, includes the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. No apprehensions have been made. Williams said the strategy of the medicine merchandisers – to leave packaged medicines in transnational waters for volley by other vessels – was extensively employed. “There’s no distrust that this discovery lands a major fiscal blow right from the South American directors through to the distributors of this product,” Coster said.
“While this disrupts the syndicate’s operations, we remain watchful given the lengths we know these groups will go to circumvent coming to law enforcement’s attention”. The seizure has a value of NZ $500 million, according to New Zealand Customs Service Acting Controller Bill Perry. Last March, a 700 kg payload of cocaine from South America was set up at a New Zealand harborage, bound for another country. At the time officers said the seizure showed how transnational crime groups were seeking to use New Zealand to pierce other requests.
