When will the tale of the floating cocaine bricks end?
Batanes’ police announced today that a fisherman from the province discovered several blocks of suspected cocaine floating in the sea.
A fisherman named Roger Gallo was fishing near Basco’s Naidi Lighthouse on Tuesday when he spotted a floating package that was believed to be cocaine, reported ABS-CBN News.
Gallo surrendered the package to the police, who reported that it weighed around one kilogram. The suspected cocaine was packed separately in three vacuum-sealed plastics which were marked with the letter “A,” Rappler reported.
The substances were then placed inside a green-colored foil that appeared to be a bag used for tea. The foil was marked with the word “guanyinwang,” reported The Philippine Daily Inquirer. The suspected cocaine will be brought to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) for testing.
If the substances are indeed cocaine, the authorities estimated that they are worth PHP5.7 million (US$110,042).
Batanes police said that this was the first time that such an incident happened in their province, reported GMA News.
Since February, bricks of cocaine have been spotted near and in the waters of places such as Davao Oriental, Quezon Province, Surigao, and Camarines Norte. It’s unclear why this is happening, but various theories have been floated to explain why this is so.
One is that they may have come from Papua New Guinea, where local cops discovered cocaine that allegedly looked the same as the ones discovered here in the Philippines.
Another is President Rodrigo Duterte’s theory that they’re from the Colombian drug cartel in Medellin. Meanwhile, PDEA Director Aaron Aquino thinks that the floating cocaine bricks are possibly decoys while a bigger shipment of drugs was smuggled into the country.
Whatever the reasons may be, let’s hope that everyone who discovers these bricks would surrender them to the police, unlike this fisherman from Surigao who kept some cocaine bricks in his home to sell them off. The man surrendered to the cops last week when he noticed that they were spying on him.
Reader Interactions