A large shipment of cocaine hidden in dozens of boxes of bananas has been seized by Portugal's police.
The unexpected ‘Columbia’s Finest’ promotion from Lidl involved the concealment of 198 packets of cocaine weighing in at 237 Kilos.
The cocaine was on a direct route to Portugal and managed to slip through customs undetected for distribution through Lidl’s Portuguese branches.
"The drug was seized in various stores in the northern part of the country," the police admitted.
The alert was raised when a customer of Lidl in Valença found a packet of cocaine and for some unexplained reason informed the store manager who called the police.
An alert went out across the Lidl network for staff to check recent deliveries of Colombian bananas. Staff in stores across the north of the country admitted to finding more packets of the drug.
Portugal’s police are carrying out further inquiries in collaboration with the Spanish authorities and with various countries in South America, to see if they can trace the source.
The old banana trick is not new as in January this year German police seized 140 kilos of cocaine hidden in boxes of bananas at a Aldi supermarket in Berlin. The consignment had travelled from Colombia direct to Hamburg.
Also, in 2010 several outlets of Lidl in Spain received banana shipments which contained hidden bricks of cocaine. The bananas had been imported from Ecuador and the Ivory Coast.
The logistical grasp displayed by the drug traffickers is poor and heads may literally be rolling back in Medellin as blame is apportioned. It seems the drugs got past the authorities but the Portuguese criminals in the operation failed to collect the shipment.
The Portuguese police will be looking at how the drugs were unloaded at a Portuguese dock, transported to the Lidl warehouse and shipped to branches without anyone finding millions of euros worth of Class A drugs.
