The container from Martinique had been officially chartered for a move. But the customs brigade of the port of Marseille seized Wednesday 71.6 kilograms of cocaine hidden “in caches arranged between two sofas”. The agents, alerted by the “marking” of an anti-narcotic dog, discovered “64 cocaine loaves”, announced the Customs Department. “Uncomfortable” living room furniture, she quips on Facebook.
This is the largest catch made in the eastern basin of the port of Marseille, mainly dedicated to ferries and cruise ships. Most of the freight traffic is carried out in the Fos-sur-Mer basin where 500 kilograms of cocaine were seized in January, said the customs communication.
This discovery follows the implementation in early July by Marseille customs officers of a new system for pooling information from different services: UCIMAR (Marseille maritime targeting unit), intended to better target containers likely to conceal fraudulent goods.
Cocaine, an “expanding” market
The market for cocaine, the second most widely used drug in the European Union after cannabis, is “expanding”. For the fourth consecutive year, record quantities of cocaine (214.6 tonnes) were seized in Europe in 2020, up 6% compared to 2019, of which three quarters were in Belgium (70 tonnes), the Netherlands Bas (49 tonnes) and Spain (38 tonnes), according to Europol and the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA).
On June 20, Belgian customs announced that they had seized 900 kg of cocaine in the port of Antwerp in a container of cocoa beans from Colombia.
In France, the quantities of cocaine seized in 2021 doubled compared to 2020, going from 9.06 tonnes to 18.62 tonnes (+ 106%), to reach a “historic” level, according to figures made public in early February by the Minister of Public Accounts Olivier Dussopt. At the beginning of June, 138 kg of cocaine had been seized in Loire-Atlantique, the Rennes prosecutor’s office announced in a press release.