Spanish customs said on Thursday that it had seized 620 kilograms of cocaine mixed in mineral salts for animal feed, shipped from Colombia to Barcelona.
The drug was discovered hidden in a shipment of coarse animal feed salt that arrived in Barcelona on January 8 and was then sent to Madrid.
In recent years, customs officials have discovered cocaine smuggled into Spain in a variety of sophisticated ways, including mixing it with fruit pulp, mixing it with wood pulp and forming it into wooden pallets.
Investigators arrested seven people, most of them Colombians and Ecuadorians, including the owner of a business near Barcelona.
A customs spokesperson told AFP that the cocaine appeared to have been dyed to avoid detection and then coated with a masking agent.
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“The salt used in animal feed is coarse and has a brownish color, so we suspect that the cocaine was dyed to look the same color,” he said.
Customs officials were alerted to the shipment and upon arrival they located it and found 1,000 bags of salt imported by a company in Sant Cugat del Valles, outside Barcelona.
Laboratory tests showed that 34 of the bags contained salt, which tested positive for cocaine, and investigators seized 620 kilograms of the drug.
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Investigators tracked the shipment to the Madrid suburb of Torrejon de Ardos and arrested six people, all Colombian or Ecuadorian, on January 22.
They also arrested the import company’s manager at his home in San Cugat del Valles.
Three suspects were detained and four others were charged and released, but their passports were confiscated.
hmw/mg/bc