German police find 400 kilograms of cocaine hidden in banana shipments

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German police find 400 kilograms of cocaine hidden in banana shipments

The Associated Press
First posted: Friday, July 31, 2015 02:02 PM EDT | Updated: Friday, July 31, 2015 02:08 PM EDT

Confiscated cocaine packed in banana boxes are displayed during a new conference in Berlin, Jan. 7, 2014. Some 140 kilos of cocaine, worth six million euros were discovered on Monday Jan. 5, 2015 packed in banana boxes in discount supermarkets in Berlin. The haul of drugs shipped from Colombia, is the second largest found by German police and customs in the last 35 years, a police spokesperson said. (REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz)

BERLIN -- German police have found some 400 kilograms (880 pounds) of cocaine hidden inside shipments of bananas sent to supermarkets across the north and west of the country.

News agency dpa reported Friday that staff at a supermarket in the city of Braunschweig discovered several packages of drugs on Wednesday.

Police searched thousands of boxes of fruit that had come to Germany with the same wholesale shipment from South America and found cocaine in five further supermarkets.

In May, Berlin police discovered more than 386 kilograms of cocaine inside banana boxes at a discount grocery chain in what they said was the largest-ever seizure of the drug in the German capital. Authorities put the market value of that find at about 15 million euros.