Cocaine washes up on remote atoll

MARSHALL ISLANDS – Professionally wrapped bags of cocaine have again washed up on the shore of Enewetak Atoll, the former United States nuclear weapons testing site in the Marshall Islands.

In the latest occurrence, police said they recovered about 18 kilograms of the drug from a local resident who found the packages on Enewetak Atoll. The resident was arrested for not immediately handing it over to authorities.

An increase in cocaine sales in the Marshalls’ capital, Majuro, was believed to be from the same shipment, police said.

The cocaine was discovered when a detective went to Enewetak last week to investigate reports of an opportunist local resident in possession of the drugs and criminal charges will be filed in court against the person who was involved in the possession, Police Commissioner George Lanwi said.

The editor of the Marshall Islands Journal, Giff Johnson, said such finds were common as the island country appeared to be on a major drug-trafficking route between South America and China.

Johnson said all the signs indicated it was a fairly recent batch of cocaine.

“If the packages had just drifted off the South America west coast and across the Pacific, they would have disintegrated,” he said.

“They probably haven’t been in the water too long, and the packages don’t appear to have any ocean growth, barnacles, or anything like that.

“So it’s pretty clear that something is happening in the neighbourhood of the Marshall Islands for these drugs to wash in here.”

A history of cocaine wash-ups in the Marshall Islands goes back into the 1980s, according to a 2012 report in the Asia Pacific Defence Reporter, an Australia-based military and law enforcement-related website.

Between 2002 and 2009, bundles of cocaine and boats with cocaine onboard were found washed up on beaches around the Marshall Islands on at least six occasions.

“This indicates a very substantial and long-established cocaine trade, and one on a massive scale,” the report said.

Commisioner Lanwi said the packages in the latest find were similar to the packages of drugs that had previously washed up on atolls in the region.

Since 2010, Australian, American and Pacific authorities have been working together under Project Cringle to target drug syndicates operating in the region.

- ABC/AFP