SYDNEY: Four men have been charged over an alleged attempt to import over 500 kilograms of cocaine into Western Australia (WA) by sea.
Authorities said in a statement on Monday that members of the public alerted police after finding several large packages tied to flotation drums about 30 kilometres off the WA coast on Nov. 6.
Officers from the WA Police Force and Australian Federal Police (AFP) were deployed and collected the packages, which were found to contain about 525 kg of cocaine with an estimated street value exceeding 170 million Australian dollars (about US$109.84 million).
A WA Joint Organised Crime Taskforce was already investigating suspicious activity by an international livestock carrier at the time, and the ship's chief officer, a 46-year-old Croatian national, was charged on Nov. 7 with attempting to import a commercial quantity of a border-controlled drug.
It will be alleged in court that the cocaine was dropped into the ocean from the vessel on its way to Fremantle harbour in WA.
A subsequent investigation of the vessel found that railings had been removed and reinstalled without proper work permits and that a CCTV camera had been covered while the drugs were allegedly offloaded.
Three more men, a 52-year-old from the WA capital of Perth and a 19 and a 36-year-old from Sydney, were also arrested and charged over alleged attempts to retrieve the cocaine from the ocean. - Xinhua
