Gardaí were on Tuesday night questioning a 22-year-old man about a major drugs seizure after Customs officers found €1.8 million worth of cannabis herb when they stopped and searched a van disembarking from a ferry at the Port of Cork terminal.
Customs officers found 97 kilos of cannabis herb, packed into 37 separate parcels and hidden in the panels of the van, during a search of the vehicle after it disembarked from the Brittany Ferries vessel Armorique at Ringaskiddy on Tuesday.
According to a statement from Customs and Excise, the search resulted from routine profiling of passengers disembarking from the vessel and with the assistance of sniffer dog, Marley, customs officers found the drugs hidden in the Polish registered vehicle.
The Polish driver was arrested by members of the Cork City Divisional Drugs Squad under drug trafficking legislation, which allows gardaí detain suspects for up to seven days, and he was brought to Togher Garda Station for questioning about the drugs.
The van was removed and taken to a secure location to allow garda technical experts to carry out a forensic examination for fingerprint and DNA evidence on both the van and the drugs which gardai believe were destined for distribution in the Cork area.
It is understood the driver boarded the ferry at Roscoff but gardaí and customs officers were seeking to establish where exactly the consignment originated and whether it may be linked to an Eastern European organised crime gang with links in the Cork area.
The seizure is the second in less than a month at the Port of Cork terminal at Ringaskiddy and follows the discovery of €12 million worth of cocaine by the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau and Customs officers at the terminal on February 18th.
Customs officers and Gardai uncovered the 172 kgs of cocaine destined for an Irish crime gang in a container of fresh bananas, pineapples and mangos aboard the freighter Maersk Nimes which had sailed from the port of Moin on Costa Rica's Carribean coast on February 6th.
No one was arrested in connection with the seizure but Garda investigations are ongoing with detectives examining closely the documentation accompanying the consignment of fruit to try and establish where it was destined for and where the crime gang was planning to collect the drugs.
