Remaining Two Honduran Drug Runners Are Remanded to Central Prison
Two men from Honduras are behind bars tonight charged in connection and a Venezuelan plane laden with sixty million dollars of cocaine that landed off the Coastal Road on the night of September ninth. The duo, Allan Yovani Mejia Chirinos and Nolan Jose Carrasco Lopez were each charged with one count of possession of controlled drug with intent to supply and for the purpose of drug trafficking. The two were part of a larger group totaling eight alleged narcos involved with the sixty million dollar cargo which has since been incinerated. The Hondurans are finally charged because they were injured and hospitalized as a result of a shoot-out with the police when the plane landed. Here is News Five’s Isani Cayetano.
Isani Cayetano, Reporting
Another pair of Honduran nationals was arraigned this morning in the lower courts, rounding off a team of eight men, all non-Belizeans, believed to be responsible for piloting, landing and attempting to discharge an aircraft carrying a payload of forty-one bales of cocaine. Thirty-one-year-old Allan Yovani Mejia Chirinos and fifty-year-old Nolan Jose Carrasco Lopez, both businessmen from San Pedro Sula, were brought in under heavy police escort. Chirinos’ right arm remains in a sling after being injured during an exchange of gunfire with local authorities on the night of September ninth, in an isolated area off the Coastal Road. Lopez, who was also shot during the incident, slowly made his way up the steps at the rear of the courthouse. They were discharged from the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital moments earlier into police custody.
Appearing unrepresented before Senior Magistrate Tricia Pitts-Anderson, the duo was read a number of charges stemming from the arrival of a Beechcraft Super King Air 200 that landed on a crude runway in the vicinity of the Coastal Road. Unable to understand what was being read to them, the men were provided with an interpreter who translated the charges into Spanish. Following the arraignment, Chirinos and Lopez were spirited to the Belize Central Prison in Hattieville where they join six others who are also on remand in connection with the drug plane. Those persons are Miguel Cruz Meseguer, a retired pilot of Tamaulipas, Mexico; David Noe Orellano Discua, Carlos Humberto Henriquez Gomez, both of San Pedro Sula; forty-three-year-old Juan Pablo Larea Cruz, an Ecuadorian commercial pilot and two other Hondurans who were detained at a resort near the outskirts of Belmopan two Fridays ago.
The quantity of cocaine, a total of one thousand, three hundred and forty-one kilograms, carried a street value of sixty million Belize dollars and was destined for North America where the insatiable appetite for the narcotic fuels the illicit drug trade. On September eighteenth, the haul was incinerated at a predetermined location outside of in the Cayo District. With all the foreign players now in custody, a few pressing questions still linger. On whose property was the makeshift landing strip built and who are the Belizean counterparts who facilitated the operation? Reporting for News Five, I am Isani Cayetano.
