COCAINE (drug) smuggling carriage caught hiding inside Banana.......
Investigators have
broken up an international
drug-trafficking ring that smuggled bricks of cocaine among
crates of
bananas being shipped from Ecuador to St.
Petersburg.
Nine Russians,
two Latvians and the suspected Ukrainian ringleader have been arrested in
connection with the four-year investigation by the Interior Ministry, the
Federal Customs Service and the Federal Security Service, officials said
Thursday. Investigators confiscated 130 kilograms of cocaine in total: 70 kilograms, with a street value of $85 million,
from a banana-laden ship headed for St. Petersburg’s harbor in 2012, and the
rest from a series of operations against the ring since 2010, Sergei Borodulin,
deputy head of the Interior Ministry’s investigative department, said at a news
conference.
“We had identified the members by the end of 2012, but
nevertheless we wanted to catch them red-handed in order to conduct the confiscation
with style,” senior Interior Ministry official Sergei Tikhonenko said, smiling
radiantly at several dozen reporters. The lucky break came in December
2012, when investigators learned that a ship arriving from Ecuador would pause
in the dead of night before reaching St. Petersburg so the drugs could be
unloaded onto the iced-over Gulf of Finland. Associates would walk over from
the shore to pick up the drugs. “The rest was a matter of technique,
professional skills and our professional pride,” Tikhonenko said. Investigators
boarded the ship several hours before the cocaine was to be unloaded and found
the drugs in the captain’s cabin packed in plastic bags shaped like bricks.
Then investigators unloaded dummy bricks of cocaine onto the ice for the
associates to pick up. It took the associates nine hours to walk, waist-deep in
snow, the several kilometers from the ship to the shore — where investigators
were waiting to detain them. The associates led the investigators to a rented
cottage in the Leningrad region that served as their hideout, where two Latvian
nationals were detained. The suspected leader of the gang, Ukrainian
national Valentin Voinovsky, was extradited to Russia from Belarus, while eight
Russian suspects were arrested in Russia.
A ninth was arrested in the Netherlands and is awaiting extradition to Russia,
Borodulin said. The two Latvians are in custody. If convicted of
drug-trafficking and related charges, the suspects face a maximum of 20 years
in prison. The investigative department that is formally handling the case
will pass it to the Prosecutor General’s Office in the next few days, Borodulin
said.
