Dozens of kilograms of cocaine were found in banana deliveries in four stores of a French supermarket chain, and the police are not sure who the recipient was, writes the British newspaper The Guardian.
Staff at the Grand Frais branch in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comte region of eastern France were stunned to find between 40 and 50 kilograms of the drug hidden under pallets of bananas and wanted to reassure customers that the cocaine had not come into contact with the fruit.
Detectives are trying to solve the mystery of how the drugs, believed to have originated in Colombia, got into the pallets and - more importantly - who they were intended for.
Olivier Karakoc, the public prosecutor for Dijon in Burgundy, said that 10 kilograms of cocaine were found in a fruit delivery to the "Grand Frais" store in Bonn.
Between 10 and 12 kilograms were found in similar deliveries to three other stores. A spokesman for Grand Frais said: "We are working closely with the police to ensure the investigation goes smoothly and that our staff and customers are safe."
The supermarket refused to provide further information to the Guardian.
Bananas appear to be the fruit of choice for South American drug traffickers, following the seizure of a number of cocaine shipments in Europe. Most of the cocaine originates from Colombia. In July, sniffer dogs found 6.000 kilograms of cocaine, worth around £173 million, hidden in a shipment of bananas in Ecuador destined for a customer in Germany.
In August, customs agents in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki discovered about 93 kilograms of cocaine in a ship from Ecuador carrying bananas. In May, around 250 kilograms of cocaine were found hidden in banana boxes in a warehouse in Colmar, eastern France.
The police also found a GPS tracking device in the package. Detectives believed the drugs were intended for delivery to Germany but were mistakenly sent to France.
In March, Bulgarian customs officials seized 170 kilograms of cocaine from a ship carrying bananas to Europe from Ecuador, while a month earlier British officials said they found 5,7 tonnes of cocaine in a similar shipment, the largest seizure of the Class A drug in the UK. .
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