About $650,000 in cocaine from a cruise was found on a container ship in Baltimore, in what authorities called a rare drug seizure at a mid-Atlantic port. The blue backpack with eight bricks of cocaine, totalling more than 20 pounds, was detected in a container of steel machine parts on the shipping vessel Ital Lunare, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The ship traveled from China to Panama, then stopped in Georgia and New Jersey, before mooring in Maryland, CBP spokesman Steve Sapp said.
Sapp said the cocaine was likely a “drop load” deposited on the ship by someone trying to smuggle drugs into the United States and it could have been placed on board at any of the ports.
“Someone must have been on this side waiting to get the drugs,” he said.
It’s now rare for authorities to find drugs on a ship in this region. That might be happening because fewer vessels are arriving from source nations or because other drug supply chains have been developed through air or ground transportation, Sapp said.
He said it’s also unusual to find drugs on a vessel arriving from China, because the contraband is usually more valuable there. Authorities say they believe the cocaine was deposited on the ship in Panama.
CBP randomly selected 50 containers from the vessel to screen, and the drugs were detected in one of them.
“Customs and Border Protection officers may scan hundreds of containers without detecting a single anomaly,” Ricardo Scheller, the CPB port director for Baltimore, said.
The agency uses imaging technology that gives investigators a picture of the container’s contents and lets them decide whether to examine the item further.
“Nonintrusive technology allows CBP officers a quick and clear picture of a conveyance’s contents so that we can expedite release of legitimate commercial goods and detain anomalous containers for a more hands-on inspect,” Scheller said.
No one has been arrested in connection with the cocaine, and CBP officials said it’s rare for arrests to be made in such cases.
Sapp said he wasn’t aware of any past smuggling activities associated with Ital Lunare.
