In Belgium, they seize 11.5 tons of cocaine from French Guiana

The record cargo was intercepted in the port of Antwerp and headed for the Netherlands.

The Belgian federal prosecutor’s office announced Thursday 5-N that police have obtained a record seizure of 11.5 tons of pure cocaine in a container from French Guiana after an investigation into an international drug trafficking network.

According to judicial sources, the cargo was intercepted in the port of Antwerp and was headed for the Netherlands.

In a note, the Belgian court estimated the market value of that shipment to be around 450 million euros (about 520 million dollars).

The interception of this shipment ended an investigation launched by the Belgian authorities at the end of 2019, with the seizure of 2.8 tons of cocaine.

According to Belgian justice, it was thus possible to dismantle a “well-structured network, which was apparently responsible for the periodic dispatch of large quantities of cocaine from South America via Belgium”.

Finally, on October 27, the authorities inspected five containers of scrap metal parts, and inside one of them found a steel container with the shipment of 11.5 tons of cocaine.

The capture of this cargo led to the arrest of two people in Belgium and a third in the Netherlands, Belgian justice reported.