Half ton of weed found in “empty” container at port
With so much cocaine coming in and out of Belize it was beginning to look like the whole of the country was one big flourmill. The result was that the homegrown marijuana industry, once renowned worldwide for “Belize Breeze,” had almost been overlooked. No longer… thanks to a massive bust this morning in Belize City.
The Port Authority compound was virtually taken over by police today, as authorities frantically tried to piece together the evidence in this morning’s dramatic drug bust.
Jacqueline Woods
“This is the forty foot container that was about to be loaded onto the ship when the crane operator noticed that it was unbalanced. He immediately alerted his supervisors.”
When Port officials opened the container, they found, not an empty box, but over a hundred neatly wrapped packages in a front compartment and immediately called in the police. Senior Superintendent of Police Raymond Thimbrel told reporters that the packages all contained marijuana.
Q: “Mr. Thimbrel, when they usually pack up these containers, don’t you have a supervisor from Port?”
Raymond Thimbrel, Superintendent of Police
“No, I wouldn’t want to go into the process, but as I understand it, it comes in either sealed from out there as to what it is you know. It comes here and then they recheck it in here before it goes out right. But once it is sealed coming in, it is accepted by a customs officer.”
Q: “And who was the person who rechecked it, do you know?”
Raymond Thimbrel
“Well that again, you see, we have to go and deal with all of that.”
While the police remain evasive about the circumstances surrounding the drug bust, sources tell News Five that some port employees may be implicated in the elaborate plan to smuggle drugs out of the country. The Manager of Caribbean Shipping Agency, Stanley Longsworth told News Five that the forty foot Hybur container was released to a customer from down south, whose name is being withheld, around the twentieth of last month. The cargo to be exported to the United States was lumber. Longsworth says that on Friday of last week, however, when the shipping agency contacted the individual to finalize the paper work, the customer told them that he was having some difficulties with documentation and would therefore be canceling the request to hire the container. That same day, Friday May twenty-ninth, the container, supposedly empty, was returned to the port authority compound and was to have been sent back to the States on Monday evening.
Police officials declined to give an estimate of the exact weight of the drugs although a press release, issued strangely enough by the U.S. embassy, said it appeared to total around a thousand pounds. More details on the bust will be provided Wednesday morning at a press conference called by Police Commissioner Ornell Brooks. The conference will update the press on new developments in the Brodies burglary and the Hummingbird Highway mass robbery and murder.
