Ninety arrested after pregnant women used to smuggle drugs

Police across western Europe have arrested 90 people in a year-long investigation into a drug ring that used pregnant women to smuggle in drugs from Africa and South America, Italian police said today.

Most of those arrested were from Nigeria and eastern European countries, said police at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, where many of the suspects had been picked up since January 2006.

Other arrests were made at major airports in Ireland, Italy, France, Switzerland, Spain and the Netherlands.

The group included 30 pregnant women, most of them Nigerian, who swallowed pellets of cocaine and heroin, hoping to avoid detection as authorities would not be allowed to take X-rays of them, said police Captain Gabriele Giuseppe Nastasi.

Police also seized 100kgs of drugs that would have fetched about €30m on the streets, Capt Nastasi said.