January the 12th, 2022 - Drugs in Croatia aren't often discussed as much as they are in various other European countries where there are severe addiction issues and raids which often make the headlines, such as in the United Kingdom. That said, there certainly are drug busts in Croatia very frequently, and the biggest of them all happened in the autumn of 2021.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, two stories broke about drugs in Croatia recently, and the two sagas regard two entirely unrelated actions. An enormous amount of heroin was found following the search of a ship that arrived from Iraq in the port of Ploce in southern Dalmatia. Local police found the large quantities of drugs down near Dubrovnik. More precisely, they came upon 220 kilograms of heroin, which is the largest seizure of this drug in the Republic of Croatia - ever.
A massive 62 kilograms of cocaine were also found, which would reach a value of around seventeen million euros if successfully sold on the street.
"This is the result of intensive work and cooperation of the Dubrovnik-Neretva Police Administration along with the customs administration and other competent institutions, all as a continuation of an operational action in which we broke up two criminal organisations in the first six months of 2021 and reported several people.
On that occasion, a total of 700 kilograms of cocaine were seized. In the first case, related to the seizure of heroin, on October the 11th last year, a search of a container from a ship that had arrived in Croatian waters from Iraq was carried out in the Port of Ploce.
There were 250 to 300 kilograms of the drug in that container, 296 packages of drugs were found,'' said Zoran Tikvica, head of the Criminal Police Service of the Dubrovnik-Neretva Police Administration, when talking about the heroin discovery.
The cocaine was found on a ship that had arrived not from Iraq but from Colombia and was otherwise transporting bulk cargo.
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