High-grade cocaine haul could have fetched €200m on streets

THE COCAINE haul seized following an intensive surveillance operation by Garda and Revenue’s Customs Service has been found in testing to have high purity levels and on the streets would fetch many multiples of the official €32 million valuation.

Garda sources indicated the consignment is as high as 80 per cent pure. Much of the cocaine sold on the streets is found to have a purity level of less than 15 per cent, meaning the haul seized in Dublin yesterday could be bulked up six-fold with glucose mixing agent and could fetch up to €200 million on the streets.

Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan said the seizure was “a very important day for law enforcement” in the Republic.

“We believe the organised crime group behind this operation is both indigenous and external. It is certainly the case that these people have lost a considerable amount of their investment.”

He said it was possible the drugs were intended to be broken into consignments and that some of these would have been used to supply the home market while some would have been smuggled abroad.

Revenue Commissioner Liam Irwin described the scale of the seized haul as “hugely significant”.

“It’s the biggest in-land seizure of drugs in the history of the State,” he said.

The Irish authorities would now work with their international counterparts in a bid to establish the exact origins of the consignment.

Last night two men were being detained by gardaí in Dublin; one from the city and another man from Nigeria aged 31 and 42 years respectively.

They were arrested under Operation Agon, which was established to track the haul once it entered the Republic.

The Irish authorities are now liaising with their foreign counterparts in an effort to establish who supplied the haul of 400kg to the Dublin-based gang. A number of Irish criminals who fled the jurisdiction for Amsterdam and Spain after the murder of Veronica Guerin in 1996 but who are still operating in a European network from abroad are suspected of involvement.

The drugs entered the State in a container via Dublin Port the week before last and were placed under surveillance. When they were collected they were followed to an industrial unit in Blanchardstown, west Dublin, where some 350kg were found yesterday.

The Nigerian man was detained when a car he was driving in Tallaght was stopped yesterday morning and a search of it yielded 50kg of the drug, believed to have been taken from the larger consignment. The Irish suspect was arrested in Leixlip, Co Kildare.

The cocaine was shipped from a European port to Ireland. Much of the cocaine in Europe is shipped from South America across the Atlantic to west Africa and then on to Europe.