MOSCOW, July 25 (RIA Novosti) – Police in the Moscow Region on Thursday seized a large shipment of cocaine stashed in a truck carrying boxes of bananas, a police spokesman said.
“Police were informed this morning that a truck with a shipment of bananas from Ecuador had arrived at a storage site in the village of Selyatino, in the Naro-Fominsk district. There were five boxes with cocaine in the shipment,” the spokesman said.
“Police seized about 95 kilograms [210 pounds] of the drug,” the official said, adding that investigators were questioning the truck driver to determine the identities of those involved in the drug-trafficking operation.
According to the 2012 World Drug Report, released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the average price of a gram of cocaine on "black markets" in Russia is $174.
The head of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service, Viktor Ivanov, said last year that about 8.8 million Russians were drug addicts and more than 18 million had tried narcotics at least once.
Some 30,000 to 40,000 Russians die every year from drug-related illnesses, according to official statistics.
