Cocaine washes up on island beach
July 13, 2007 - 3:14PM
Marshall Islands police are investigating reports up to $A60 million worth of cocaine was aboard a boat found washed up on a remote atoll in the impoverished nation.
Major Wedmond Langrine from the Republic of Marshall Islands Police said officers were on their way to the Ailinglaplap Atoll to confirm the find.
Reports suggest 12 to 60 kilograms of cocaine was aboard a twin-engine speedboat found abandoned on the atoll.
Langrine said police were alerted by islanders who located the drugs aboard the vessel.
"They called us to tell us via radio. They said they they had found it on the island, in a small speedboat trapped alongside the island on a rip," Langrine said.
According to Radio New Zealand islanders wanted to salvage the boat but could not lift it because of its weight, so they removed the floorboards to make it easier to bail it out.
Underneath the floor they found plastic rubbish bags filled with bundles of cocaine.
It would not be the first time the Marshall Islands, a country of just 62,000 people that gained independence from the US in 1986, had been at the centre of a major cocaine find.
In March 2004 a boat loaded with cocaine washed up on an island in the Marshall Islands.
On that occasion a 57-year-old grandmother who found the drugs was later jailed after evidence she was selling 20 kilograms of the drugs to people on nearby Kwajalein Atoll where there is a US Army base.
Two US workers at the base were also arrested.
Professionally wrapped packages of cocaine have washed up on the Marshall Islands at least five times since the 1990s according to reports, leading to a belief that the islands are used as pick up points for drug shipments.
The Marshalls consist of a group of islands and atolls located in the North Pacific Ocean about halfway between Hawaii and Australia.
AAP
