Tapped conversation of drug dealer creating waves in Suriname

(de Ware Tijd) PARAMARIBO – In the past ten years the police has not received any reports of drugs planes stranding in the Tibiti area. However, in local security circles this statement is taken with a pinch of salt. Drug trafficking suspect Piet Wortel talked about drugs transports via Suriname in his house in Amsterdam on 29 March. The conversation was tapped by Dutch police and reported in the NOS journal last Sunday.
‘We’ve checked the facts and no police records show that planes have stranded in the area and have been burnt down,’ police PR Officer Humphrey Naarden says. The Dutch dossiers show that Wortel had told fellow suspect Harry how an acquaintance had requested his help in retrieving 400 kilograms from a stranded plane in the Tibiti area. The police was aware of the plane being in the area. ‘The only persons that could move in and out of the area unheeded would be Bouta and Dino’, are Wortel’s exact words. Wortel knows of Dino intercepting the shipment and putting the plane ablaze. ‘Bouta kept half of the shipment as compensation.’
Naarden denies a police unit has ever entered the Tibiti area to look for an alleged stranded plane. Foreign Minister Winston Lackin wonders how President Bouterse could have assisted Dutch officials in the Wortel case if he was his partner in crime. Based on the request by the Dutch officials, Dutch police and the Prosecutor’s Office raided Wortel’s houses here in April and interrogated suspects.