CANU makes cocaine bust in Berbice

-five held

A Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit (CANU) operation in Berbice today netted 40 kilogrammes (82 pounds) of cocaine and five suspects including a Canadian national have been held, Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee said this morning.

Addressing reporters at a PPP/C press conference at Freedom House, he said that head of CANU, James Singh had earlier communicated to him that sometime between last night and this morning, the bust was made. No more information is available as yet.

Rohee in commending CANU said that the bust shows that drugs are still entering Guyana  through “our porous borders”. He stressed that CANU was able to use intelligence effectively in this operation.

According to Rohee the Canadian who was held “was caught before here, put on bail and now he back in the drug trade”.

“Everyone recognises that one of the problems we have is porous borders and these people who are involved in this kind of trade will constantly keep working on it to see how they can outfox the state security forces. That’s their job… but at the same time we have to constantly keep working to see how we could capture them,” Rohee said.

He said law enforcement agencies had to sharpen their tools and more resources and training have to be provided.

“People don’t want to talk the whole story because they don’t want to make the government look good, so they would only talk half,” he stated.

He commended CANU saying that the officers were able to use intelligence effectively in this operation.

This is the second major drug bust in Berbice in as many weeks.

On the night of October 22, CANU seized 30 kilogrammes of cocaine in three buckets on in an operation that saw the exchange of gunfire with drug traffickers, who then managed to escape in a boat at the Number 73 beach.

Singh confirmed to this newspaper that there was an exchange of gunfire between his men and the occupants of a boat. He said while the persons in the boat managed to escape, the ranks seized the drugs, which were in the three buckets. Ten kilogrammes of cocaine were found in each bucket.

Follow-up investigations led to two men being taken into custody by CANU and they are now assisting with investigations.