In a bid to evade the po­lice and avoid ar­rest dur­ing a spe­cial op­er­a­tion at Mara­cas Bay on Tues­day, a man aban­doned a car which had over $5 mil­lion worth of mar­i­jua­na and jumped in­to a near­by riv­er.

The spe­cial op­er­a­tion took place from 10 am -3 pm and was co­or­di­nat­ed by Snr Supt Sher­ma May­nard-Wil­son, Supt McKen­zie and ASP Pitt. Mem­bers of the North­ern Di­vi­sion Task Force Area South and a Spe­cial­ist Unit of the TTPS were al­so in­volved.

Po­lice said around 1 pm, a par­ty of of­fi­cers was at the Foren­sic Sci­ence Cen­tre in St James to sub­mit and col­lect ex­hibits. While there, they re­ceived in­for­ma­tion that a car car­ry­ing firearms and nar­cotics was on the way out of Mara­cas Bay.

As the of­fi­cers lat­er at­tempt­ed to in­ter­cept the car along the North Coast Road, near The Pil­lars, the dri­ver sped off. The of­fi­cers pur­sued the car along Sad­dle Road through the San­ta Cruz area, where the dri­ver even­tu­al­ly stopped, ran out the car, and jumped off a bridge in­to a riv­er and es­caped.

Fol­low­ing a search of the ve­hi­cle, of­fi­cers re­cov­ered three bales con­tain­ing a to­tal of 90 bricks of cannabis, which amount­ed to 49.74 kg with an es­ti­mat­ed street val­ue of $5,458,815.78 in the trunk. —An­na_Lisa Paul