PARIS: French customs officers have seized more than two and a half tons of cocaine off the French Caribbean island of Martinique in two separate anti-drug operations last week.
In the first operation, which was carried out Wednesday night, officials seized approximately 2.5 tons of drugs with an estimated street value of 100 million Euros ($107 million) from a sailboat off the island’s coast. The effort brought a two-year-long international investigation to a close.
The second, smaller-scale drug bust took place on Friday, when customs officers found a further 485 pounds of cocaine on board a Guyanese tugboat, in a joint operation carried out by France and the Joint Interagency Task Force South, a US agency specializing in multinational operations against drug trafficking.
After Wednesday’s operation, France’s Finance Minister Michel Sapin and Budget Secretary Christian Eckert released a joint statement describing the drugs seizure as “historic.”
Speaking on France 2 Sunday, a spokesman for France’s National Directorate of Intelligence and Customs Investigations (Direction Nationale du Renseignement et des Enquêtes Douanières — DNRED) said the bust made on stormy seas was “the biggest cocaine seizure in the entire 200-year history of French customs” and “one of France’s 10 largest cocaine seizures anywhere in the world.”
According to the DNRED, the yacht named the Silandra was allegedly headed to Europe when customs officers stopped the 20-meter vessel around 9pm Wednesday night.
