Mozambican authorities have detained a woman attempting to smuggle 19.5 kilograms of drugs across the Ressano Garcia border post with South Africa in Maputo province, a police source said on Tuesday. The woman was arrested as the result of a tipoff, and the drugs found hidden in the car she was driving, Elino Panguana, a spokesman for the National Criminal Investigation Service (Sernic) in Maputo province, told the media.
“It is opium, a drug derived from methamphetamine and heroin. It is a dangerous drug indeed. We await more consistent results [from experts] on it,” the Sernic spokesman said, adding that the drug was from Matola, on the outskirts of Maputo. “Sernic is doing everything it can to apprehend the alleged owner of the vehicle, and we believe that we will be able to clarify this situation,” he concluded.
Several international organizations have identified Mozambique as a newly favoured corridor for international drug trafficking. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), authorities in Kenya and Tanzania, countries to the north of Mozambique, have stepped up surveillance in recent years, pushing traffickers south towards the Mozambican coast, “looking for new routes and new markets”.
On March 19, Mozambican authorities seized 440 kilos of heroin in a residence in Quelimane, in the centre of the country. The seizure occurred in the wake of others earlier in the year. On March 10, police seized 103 kilograms of heroin, ‘crack’ and hashish, found in a vehicle during a police inspection on National Road No. 1 in Murrupula district, Nampula province.
On February 2, the police arrested a businessman in the city of Pemba, Cabo Delgado, in the north of the country, in possession of 180 kilograms of ephedrine, a substance used to manufacture drugs. On January 28 of this year, the French navy announced that one of its frigates in the Indian Ocean had seized 417 kilograms of methamphetamine and 27 kilograms of heroin in a dhow off the coast of Mozambique, a cargo estimated to be worth more than €40 million. The same week, Mozambican authorities detained a 37-year-old man unloading 61 kilograms of heroin and five kilograms of methamphetamine on the shore of Nacala Porto district.
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