Cocaine In Bananas

11 July 2014, 18:13 | Updated: 11 July 2014, 18:14

Police officers have found cocaine with an estimated street value of £25 million hidden in plastic fruit among a shipment of bananas from Colombia.

Officers from the Metropolitan Police's Special Projects Team tracked a lorry carrying the consignment of bananas from when it arrived in Dover at 6am on Thursday 10 July 2014 to a unit at the Oast Park Trading Estate in Hartlip, Kent at 9am. They also watched as a 48-year-old man unloaded it into a warehouse.

The warehouse was kept under surveillance while another team monitored three other men, who later met in an internet cafe in Stockwell, London, and are believed to have accessed instructions relating to the shipment, the force said.

The three Colombian men, 36, 39 and 46, were arrested as they left the cafe at 7.30pm.

Officers in Kent raided the warehouse at 10.30pm and found 150kg of the class A drug compressed into plastic bananas and hidden among the real fruit.

The man who unloaded the shipment, who is from Kent, was also arrested but the lorry driver has been ruled out of the conspiracy.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: "The recovered drugs have a wholesale value of around £7 million, with a street value in excess of £25 million.

"All four men remain in custody at a London police station."