Police in the Marshall Islands have confiscated three kilogrammes of cocaine that were brought into Majuro from a remote outer island where the drugs washed up recently.
Photo: Marshall Islands Journal
A local man accompanying the cocaine on an Air Marshall Islands flight this week was arrested, questioned and released while the investigation continues, police said.
Law enforcement authorities said the individual brought three "bricks" of plastic-wrapped white powder weighing about one kilogramme each that were located underneath layers of freshly cut, uncooked pieces of pig parts in a food and drink cooler.
The confiscation of the cocaine from Ailuk Atoll was the latest development in an explosion of hard drug use in the nation's capital, Majuro, since last year.
That was when cocaine, allegedly from a large volume that washed into Maloelap, another remote atoll, began being fed into the Majuro market and distributed in small nuggets as crack cocaine.
In the March-April period, there were four suicides in men ranging in age from 31 to 54 who were associated with hard drug use and well outside the suicide profile in the country that normally involved teenagers and young adults.
For two decades, professionally wrapped bundles of cocaine, sometimes in excess of 100 kilogrammes, had washed up on the beaches of different atolls in the Marshall Islands.
US and Marshall Islands law enforcement authorities have said these large volumes of cocaine washing up on remote atolls reflect either use of the area as a transshipment point between South America and Asia, or drugs thrown overboard to avoid arrest by law enforcement that drift into the islands.
The packages of white powder confiscated at the airport this week were later confirmed as cocaine, said Criminal Investigation Division Head, Captain Vincent Tani.
Tani was part of the police group that arrested the man and confiscated the cocaine at Amata Kabua International Airport.
The three one-kilogramme cocaine packages have a street value in the US of at least $US600,000, according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime.
Tani said the arrival of the cocaine from Ailuk Atoll suggested there was a lot of washed up cocaine at Ailuk and no one had reported .
Cocaine had also been coming into Majuro from a similar supply in Maloelap Atoll, according to multiple reports.
It is sold locally mostly in the form of crack cocaine - as small "rocks" that sell for $US5 each.
Meanwhile, three Majuro men have been charged since late June with selling crack cocaine, including the latest one late last week.
Brown Tartios is the third Majuro man to be taken to court by the Attorney General's office for alleged drug dealing since late June this year.
The ongoing prosecutions of alleged drug dealers in different communities around Majuro suggest the widespread use of crack cocaine in the capital.
Tartios is charged with one count of selling of prohibited drug, a felony-level charge that carries with it a potential penalty of up to 15 years in jail and a $US50,000 fine.
Tartios was charged based on a police sting operation in which he sold two pieces of crack cocaine to a police informant who went to his home to make the purchase, according to the charge before the High Court.