This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

They were expecting a container full of food additives. What the employees of a storage and freight logistics company in Spain found instead was 700kg of cocaine, separated into hundreds of brick-sized, 2kg packages and neatly wrapped in plastic.

Catalan police are now investigating how more than half a tonne of the drug accidentally ended up being sent to a business in an industrial park in Esparreguera, a town 20 miles north-west of Barcelona.

Employees called the police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, after noticing a suspicious substance in a container that had been shipped by a regular client in Guatemala.

“We were unloading the contents when we noticed several bundles of a substance that wasn’t supposed to be there,” the owner told El País, declining to give his name. Hidden within the shipment was 18 sports bags, packed to the brim with packages of cocaine and tied with yellow and green ropes.

Police believe the distributors of the drugs sneaked them onto the container in Guatemala, with the goal of intercepting the shipment before it arrived at its destination.

For some reason they failed, leaving the stunned business owner on the receiving end of a huge amount of cocaine.

As he explained to El País: “In the more than 50 years that I’ve worked in this sector, this is the first time I’ve had something like this happen to me.”