Spain: The Drug That Came to Dinner
The Spanish police said Friday that they had detained a man who received in the mail a 42-piece dinner set made with 44 pounds of cocaine. The man, 35, was arrested as he received a package containing cups, plates and bowls at his home in Barcelona, the police said in a statement. The package was sent in mid-February from Maracaibo, Venezuela, via London. The police suspect that the man had been recruited by a Venezuelan drug trafficking gang to receive the package and hand it over to associates who would extract the compressed cocaine from the dinner set.
In separate cases at Barcelona’s airport this month, the police said they detained an Ecuadorean woman who tried to enter Spain with liquid cocaine hidden in spray cans of cleaning agents, and a Chilean man whose broken leg was covered in a “cast” made of cocaine.