Scotland Yard investigators looking into the discovery of 120 kilogrammes of cocaine in a consignment of mora logs which arrived in the United Kingdom have spoken with a number of timber exporters and personnel at the city wharf from where the logs were shipped.

Stabroek News understands that the questioning of the wharf employees was very thorough.

The investigators arrived here on Thursday, some five months after HM Custom officials uncovered the cocaine which arrived via the MV Antilles in the United Kingdom at Felixstowe on May 29.

The Custom officials in collaboration with officers of the United Kingdom’s National Crime Squad and the Gwent Police tracked it to an industrial estate in Newport, Wales, where they arrested seven men who are before a Cardiff Crown Court on charges related to the importation of the cocaine. Their next court appearance is on December 12.

Information about the case and a formal request for assistance with investigations at this end were not transmitted until several months after the June bust but sources close to the police did say that there had been informal contacts by the UK authorities.

Since the bust a number of persons have been detained in the United Kingdom and Canada on drug charges including a South African citizen who was arrested in Manchester, England where she arrived on a BWIA flight which originated here and Mia Rahaman, a former Miss Guyana/Universe, who was arrested at Lester Pearson International Airport in Ontario, Canada, where she arrived on a direct flight from Georgetown.

And several weeks after the discovery of the cocaine in the timber consignment, HM Customs also uncovered at Felixstowe 42 kilogrammes of cocaine in a consignment of rice that was bound for Ghana.

That shipment was tracked to Tema, in Ghana in collaboration with the Narcotics Control Board of Ghana, which arrested three Ghanaian citizens — two of whom operate out of Amsterdam — when they took delivery of the rice.