The soldiers of the Guardia di Finanza of Livorno and the officials of the Customs Agency have discovered an international drug trafficking arriving at the port of Livorno. 158 kilos of pure cocaine were seized, divided into 140 loaves and for a value on the marketplace of over 40 million euros, which had been hidden inside the structure of a container.
The operation, coordinated by the Livorno Public Prosecutor's Office, is the result of the analysis on the cargo manifests of merchant ships coming from routes at risk, in contrast to illicit trafficking and smuggling in general. Approximately 474 thousand doses would have been obtained from the seized drug, appropriately cut.
From the checks carried out on about twenty containers aboard a merchant ship on the quay at the port of Livorno that had stopped in Malta, no immediate and obvious criticalities emerged at first. Subsequently, the Adm officials and the financiers checked some pallets of goods and, subsequently, the structure of the containers was examined which, as in the case of the refrigerated ones, lend themselves to particular methods of contamination and concealment of drugs. In this case, however, the traffickers devised a new and ingenious method of hiding the drug: they had used a double bottom made on the roof of the container.
The inspection of a container in fact aroused particular interest since the structure of the metal roof of the container had empty areas, i.e. spaces without the typical thermo-insulating material. At that point, the intervention of the firefighters was required who unsoldered part of the container roof, allowing the drug to be extracted and recovered.
(Unioneonline / vl)
