Mark Bas­sant

For the third time in two weeks, of­fi­cers from the Cus­toms and Ex­cise Di­vi­sion have dis­cov­ered pack­ages at the T&T Na­tion­al Mail Cen­tre in Pi­ar­co with co­caine hid­den in­side.

Se­nior Cus­toms of­fi­cers told Guardian Me­dia that around 3.30 pm yes­ter­day, a spe­cial ex­er­cise was con­duct­ed at the cen­tre where spe­cif­ic pack­ages were be­ing mon­i­tored. Of­fi­cers first in­spect­ed pack­ages that con­tained food­stuff but did not find any­thing il­le­gal.

How­ev­er, of­fi­cers lat­er ex­am­ined a pack­age con­tain­ing sou­venir trin­kets. In a sou­venir steel­pan, af­ter it was tak­en apart, co­caine was found packed around the edges. They al­so dis­cov­ered co­caine hid­den in sou­venirs con­tain­ing one-dol­lar bills that were en­closed in glass cas­es and packed with coins. Sources said when they drilled through the dol­lar bills, they found co­caine hid­den in­side.

All the pack­ages found weighed just un­der a to­tal of one kilo­gram of co­caine. The es­ti­mat­ed street val­ue of a kilo­gram of co­caine is US$80,000 (TT$544,000).

On Mon­day this week, Cus­toms and Ex­cise of­fi­cers al­so un­earthed close to nine kilo­grams of co­caine hid­den in sev­er­al items they searched be­tween then and last Fri­day. That co­caine was ap­prox­i­mate­ly 8.5 kilo­grams and amount­ed to US$720,000 (TT$4.8m).

Two Fri­days ago, Cus­toms and Ex­cise of­fi­cers al­so found $.3m worth of co­caine in pre­served fruits at the T&T Na­tion­al Mail Cen­tre.

In a re­lease late yes­ter­day, TTPost said they were cur­rent­ly up­grad­ing their se­cu­ri­ty pol­i­cy on the use of couri­er and par­cel post ser­vices to send doc­u­ments and parcels over­seas.

“Ef­fec­tive May 10, 2021, all cus­tomers ten­der­ing pack­ages for over­seas ship­ment are re­quired to pro­vide our Counter Staff with a clear pho­to­copy of na­tion­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion in ad­di­tion to the orig­i­nal for ver­i­fi­ca­tion pur­pos­es,” TTPost said.

TTPost added that it want­ed “to as­sure the pub­lic that the cor­po­ra­tion will con­tin­ue to en­hance its se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures to pro­tect the best in­ter­ests of all cus­tomers, mail items, as well as the rep­u­ta­tion of the or­gan­i­sa­tion.”