Lavern De Vries
21 November 2008
Police have swooped on three drug mules carrying millions of rands worth of cocaine, tik and Cat within hours of each other at Cape Town International Airport.
The first arrest was made at about 9.30am on Thursday, after a Durban woman was identified by police profilers as she disembarked from a flight from Buenos Aires.
She was taken to the airport police station where she was given laxatives.
Police discovered that she had swallowed 52 cocaine-filled condoms. The woman had also inserted another cocaine-filled condom containing an estimated half a kilogram of cocaine into her vagina.
Police say the woman's arrest is part of an alarming trend which has seen them arrest more local mules over the past six months.
Police spokesman Captain Andre Traut said that after discharging the drugs, the woman had been taken to an undisclosed hospital as was the procedure in these cases.
In these cases, if the suspect dies in police custody, the police are not held liable, said Traut.
The street value of all the cocaine found on the woman has still to be calculated, but part of it is estimated to be worth R1,5-million.
Between noon and 3pm on Thursday, police arrested a 23-year-old Zambian woman carrying 3,5kg of tik with an estimated street value of R1m. She was taken into custody after an inspection with a sniffer dog uncovered the drugs.
During this time, police also arrested a Somali man carrying 28kg of Cat worth R33 000 in his luggage. The suspect's flight details were not released to the press.
Speaking at the weekly provincial police briefing at the airport yesterday, Senior Superintendent Anton Olivier said airport police had noticed a new trend in drug trafficking.
"From the middle of the year we started seeing that more of our arrests were of people coming off local rather than international flights," he said.
The most common drug entering the airport was Cat, followed closely by cocaine and tik, and was mostly brought in via Somalia.
Cat, which was imported in plant form and imbibed by chewing, was normally stacked under flowers, Olivier said.
He said drug smugglers were becoming more sophisticated in the way they transported drugs.
"Sometimes they will smuggle drugs and it will be part of the luggage. Other times the container itself was the drug," said Olivier.
SAPS national ports Captain Dennis Adrio said drug mule ar-rests also often led to the arrests of the syndicates who paid them to bring in the drugs. He pointed to two cases in which laboratories were bust, one in September and the other last month.
One of the labs yielded 2kg of chloric acid containing methamphetamine, 2kg ephedrine, 6 x 25 litres of various chemicals and lab equipment worth R20 000.
Other successes for the year included the seizure of various drugs worth more than R20m, a 60 percent decrease in the theft of vehicles from parking lots at the airport and the recovery of 24 vehicles which were often stolen by syndicates and parked in the airport's parking lot for a "cooling off" period.
Adrio announced that the airport police's capacity had increased with an additional 98 officers who were undergoing profile and civil aviation skills training.
By the end of next year 60 more officers would be recruited at the airport for the 2010 World Cup.
The three suspects are due to appear in court soon.
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