More than four tonnes of cocaine hidden in soybean bags in the port of Rotterdam have been discovered by Dutch customs, making it the biggest seizure of the year, the prosecution said on Sunday.
The drug, whose value is estimated at 313 million euros, was discovered overnight from Saturday to Sunday aboard a container from Paraguay and bound for a company in Portugal, via Uruguay.
"This is the biggest seizure this year" in the Netherlands, a public prosecutor told the ANP news agency.
Turntables
Last week, seizures were made almost daily in the largest port in Europe, which has become one of the main gateways for drug trafficking, especially cocaine, on the continent.
In September, police seized an almost similar amount of cocaine worth an estimated 301 million euros at the port.
The Netherlands and Belgium have become the main hubs for cocaine trafficking to Europe, supplanting Spain, according to a report by the European police agency Europol published in September.
The growing use of the transport of goods in containers, by capitalizing on the large capacities of the port terminals of Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg "have consolidated the role of the Netherlands as a transit zone", cocaine , he specified.
In 2020, cocaine seizures in Antwerp totaled 65.6 tonnes, according to Europol, and in February 2021, Germany and Belgium made a record seizure of 23 tonnes of drugs concealed in sea containers. .
After cannabis, cocaine is the second most widely used drug in Western and Central Europe, with the most recent estimates putting the number of users in 2020 at 4.4 million, the report concludes.