One-tonne cocaine shipment seized

Authorities in Colombia have seized one metric ton of cocaine disguised as printer ink and bound for Mexico.

The police said a drug-sniffing Labrador at Bogota’s El Dorado airport detected the narcotics hidden in 48 boxes of a one-metric tonne cargo shipment bound for a company in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.

There were no arrests and police wouldn’t say on which airline the illegal cargo shipment had been stashed.

The police said on Monday that as soon as the black powder tested positive for cocaine, they alerted their Mexican counterparts, which led to the bust of a similar amount of so-called black cocaine at Mexico City’s airport, on a flight that had departed Bogota hours earlier.

Mexico’s federal police told The Associated Press they had no knowledge of a weekend interdiction.

An anonymous spokesman, who was not authorised to discuss the operation publicly, said the only recent bust matching the characteristics described by Colombian police occurred a week ago, when authorities at Mexico City’s airport, acting on an anonymous phoned-in tip, found cocaine camouflaged in 40 sacks of black zinc oxide, weighing one ton.

Authorities in Colombia still need to extract the cocaine alkaloid from the toner powder in which it was hidden to determine its final weight.

Colombia is the largest supplier of cocaine to the US and much of the narcotic lands on American streets through Mexican drug cartels.