€9.93m worth of cocaine found hidden in machinery

Cocaine with a street value of €9.93 million was found hidden in digger machinery at one of the UK’s biggest ports, investigators said yesterday.

The haul was found inside industrial digger machinery at Tilbury, Essex, said UK Border Agency officials.

Investigators said the drugs were found in three pieces of machinery shipped by container from Surinam and destined for Holland.

A UK Border Agency spokesman described the discovery as “the biggest single detection of class A drugs at the port in six years”.

The spokesman said the drugs had been found on Friday and experts had spent the past few days searching the machinery.

He added: “Sections of the machinery had been hollowed out and then filled with 145 individual packages of the Class A drug, totalling 166kg.”