Maputo, 30 Jun (AIM) – Mozambique’s National Criminal Investigation Service (Sernic) on Friday claimed that the police had seized almost one and a half tonnes of cocaine at Maputo International Airport, which had come from Guarulhos in Brazil.
Three staff of the Mozambique Tax Authority (AT) were arrested, and one official from MHS, the company that provides cargo handling services at the airport.
Sernic spokesperson Hilario Lole told a Maputo press conference, that the cocaine had been hidden in a consignment of 120 boxes of lollipops. When customs officials opened the boxes, they found they contained a white powder which proved to be cocaine.
Lole put the weight of the consignment at 1.4 tonnes. “Some are real sweets”, he said, “but most are drugs disguised as sweets”.
However, the figures given by Lole are completely impossible. 1.4 tonnes of cocaine would be far and away the largest drug bust in Africa in recent years.
Although the value of cocaine varies wildly from country to country, a haul of this size would certainly be worth tens of millions of dollars. For example, the street value of 1.4 tonnes of cocaine in London in 2021 was 154 million dollars.
The largest recent cocaine seizure in South Africa was in the port of Durban in December 2023, and was worth 8.29 million dollars.
Sernic would have us believe that boxes of fake lollipops unloaded at the Maputo airport cargo terminal were worth almost 20 times the value of the largest recent drug haul in South Africa.
Sernic’s impossible figure was uncritically repeated in most of the Mozambican media.
Sernic was clearly referring to one of the recent drug seizures mentioned in a Friday release from the Central Office for the Fight against Organised and Transnational Crime (GCCCOT).
This said that the 120 boxes of lollipops seized on Thursday each contained drugs weighing 1.356 kilos. This gives a total of 168 kilos, which is large, but not impossible.
The confusion seems to arise from the different way numbers are written in the Portuguese and English languages. The two languages use commas and full stops in diametrically opposite ways. Thus one million is written in English as 1,000,000, but in Portuguese as 1.000.000. This leaves ample room for confusion.
The “1.356” kilos of fake lollipops mentioned in the GCCCOT statement, can be rounded up to 1.4 tonnes, if Portuguese notation is used and if it is assumed that the GCCCOT is talking about the entire consignment rather than each box.
There is similar confusion over an earlier drugs seizure. On 19 June, two Mozambican citizens were detained in possession of 446 boxes containing cocaine disguised as roll-on deodorants. The GCCCOT statement gives the weight of these boxes as “90.806” kilos.
In Portuguese notation, that would be the clearly impossible figure of almost 91 tonnes of cocaine. It is thus safe to assume that in this case the GCCCOT was using English notation and the seizure was somewhat less than ninety one kilos.
(AIM)
Pf/ (502)
