The Argentine police secured 389 kilos of cocaine stored in 12 suitcases in the Russian embassy in Buenos Aires. A Russian diplomat is reported to have brought them to the premises.
360 packets were to have been sent to Europe and Russia by diplomatic mail. The estimated cost the drugs found was estimated at $50 mln.
Argentine and Russian services learned about the ‘diplomatic’ smuggling channel in 2016. Then agents replaced cocain by flour and put GPS transmitters in suitcases to track smugglers’ location. After the goods reached Russia, three suspects, including an accountant of the Russian embassy, were arresred. In Argentina, two people were arrested. One of them was 35-year-old Ivan Blizniuk, a Russian-born employee of the Argentine police.
There has been a wave of jokes on the web after making the fact about the cocaine in the embassy public.
“Such cocaine can be purchased at any pharmacy,” Internet users pictured Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov as a druglord. This is a reference to the words of Vladimir Putin, who once said that the uniforms of ‘green men’ in Crimea might have been bought in any store selling military articles.
