Italy police find 2 tonnes of cocaine floating at sea

Rome: In a record seizure on Monday, almost two tonnes of cocaine was found floating at sea just off the coast near eastern Sicily, Italian police reported.

According to the police, the recovered cocaine has a market value of more than 400 million euros ($440 million)

The Guardia di Finanza said in a statement that the drugs were stowed in about 70 watertight parcels, carefully shut, held together by fishermen's nets and fitted with a bright signalling apparatus.

The statement added that the "peculiar packaging methods and the presence of a luminous device to allow tracking" suggest the haul was dumped at sea by a cargo ship for it to be recovered later.

The seizure compared with the 20 tonnes of cocaine that Italian police thwarted over the whole of 2021, according to the anti-drugs unit figures released last June, stressing that was the highest yearly amount on record.

At that time the police noted that cocaine seizures rose more than five-fold from 3.6 tonnes in 2018. The anti-drug unit described Italy as a key transit path for the cocaine trade where Balkan criminal gangs consolidated their positions.

After the seizure, Deputy Prime Minister and Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini tweeted on Monday, "Congratulations to the Guardia di Finanza for this extraordinary operation: (I am) against all drugs and for life, no matter what".