Bananas!

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A shelf-stacker in a Lidl’s supermarket in Madrid found a brick of cocaine under a bunch of bananas on Saturday. The police were called and 25 more such cocaine bricks were found in banana boxes sent to other Lidl shops and worth, apparently, several million euros.

The fruit came from Ecuador and the Ivory Coast and is not the first time cocaine has been found in boxes of bananas.

What is surprising about the story is not that the drug smugglers appear to have made a mistake in failing to recover the cocaine before it was shipped to supermarkets, but that Spanish police last year seized more than 14 tons of cocaine, that had been smuggled into the country in stuffed animals, nappies, seafood and even a picture of the Sacred Heart.

Fourteen tons! And that is in just one country. The mind boggles as to the weight of cocaine that is actually shipped world-wide and, alas, handled by unscrupulous middlemen to be distributed to vulnerable drug addicts..

Not So Quick Please

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At a time when officers from the UK Border Agency found cocaine worth £1.7 million inside an HGV trailer coming into Harwich from Holland, I’m not sure I’d be too quick to criticise those members of the UKBAs staff who received bonuses totalling £295,000 last year.

As well as finding illegal immigrants stowed away in lorries and trucks, the UKBA people that work our ports and airports do sterling work and we often hear of the huge drugs and other illegal hauls they detect.

Sure, the immigration side of the UKBA is in disarray but, as I understand it, their staff can be posted to ports and airports to detect illegal hauls as well as to desks to sort through immigration issues or check passports, etc.

I, for one, wouldn’t want to work for the UKBA. Not unless a bonus was guaranteed!
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