The Romanian police discovered and seized more than a ton of high quality cocaine, which was hidden in a boat turned upside down in the Danube Delta.
The discovery of the large quantity of cocaine wrapped in balloons next to a capsized boat in the eastern town of Sfantu Gheorghe had an estimated value of around 300 million euros.
According to Romania’s organised crime and terrorism unit, DIICOT, prosecutors were notified that on Wednesday night, a kilogram of cocaine fell from a van near a village in the county Tulcea in the east of the country.
“On the evening of Wednesday, March 20, in Tulcea County, a pouch with a kilogram of cocaine was lost from a van registered in Romania. The physico-chemical analysis carried out in a laboratory in Constanta showed that the purity of the narcotic was 90 percent, “DIICOT Chief Prosecutor Felix Banila said on Tuesday in a statement.
On Friday morning, searches of a beach on the Black Sea area of Sfantu Gheorghe, discovered packages similar to those discovered two days before.
“Following investigations into the cargo route, Romanian investigators found Friday morning, on the Black Sea, in the area of Sfantu Gheorghe location, a boat overturned. On the shore and in the boat they discovered packages wrapped in rubber balloons with the same logo, content and way of packing with the lost package two days before,”the DIICOT chief reported.
Some 1,040 kilos of crude cocaine was found in total, with a market value of up to 300 million euros, but investigators estimate that the final value could have been tripled had it been combined with other substances.
The DIICOT chief said that though the original discovery “was an accidental thing”, the detection of the main haul of cocaine was “the result of a large investigation starting on the evening of March 2019, which ended with the discovery on the Black Sea”.
Two Serb citizens were detained in relation to the seizure.
