Two tonnes of cocaine washes up on beaches in north west France

Sealed bags containing cocaine with an estimated street value of €150million have washed up on the northern French coast in the past few days.

Published: 3 March 2023 08:42 CET

Two tonnes of cocaine washes up on beaches in north west France

Gendarmes patrol a beach in northwest France after cocaine with an estimated street value of €150m washed on the Channel coast. (Photo by Lou BENOIST / AFP)

The drug was found in two batches of watertight packages that weighed 2.3 tonnes in total on the Normandy coast, one on Sunday and one on Wednesday, a source with knowledge of the find told AFP.

The total street value of the cocaine is estimated at €150 million.

On Sunday, several bags totalling 850 kilos were found on the Reville beach near the northern tip of Normandy, and six more bags turned up on Wednesday on the nearby beach of Vicq-sur-Mer.

Police are still uncertain where the cocaine came from – whether traffickers threw it overboard deliberately to avoid arrest, or whether it came loose from their boats in heavy weather, sources in the investigation told AFP.

The local maritime authorities said they were on “special watch” in the area, using aircraft, but no more drugs had been spotted.

The last time that a major cocaine shipment washed up on the French coast was in 2019, when a total of 1.6 tonnes was found strewn all along the French Atlantic coast.

On Wednesday, the government said that it had seized 27 tonnes of cocaine last year, a five-fold increase over the past 10 years, as Europe faces a surge in trafficking and use of the drug.

Seizures were up five percent last year compared with 2021, according to interior ministry figures, with more than half of the narcotic coming from the West Indies and France’s poverty-stricken South American region of Guiana.

As the illegal trade has swelled, most cocaine now enters Europe through northern ports like Rotterdam, Antwerp, Hamburg and France’s Le Havre.

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The French Jewish community, the third largest in the world, has for months been on edge in the face of a growing number of attacks and desecrations of memorials.

“National police in Rouen neutralised early this morning an armed individual who clearly wanted to set fire to the city’s synagogue,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Police responded at 6.45 am to reports of “fire near the synagogue”, a police source said.

A source close to the case told AFP the man “was armed with a knife and an iron bar, he approached police, who fired. The individual died”.

“It is not only the Jewish community that is affected. It is the entire city of Rouen that is bruised and in shock,” Rouen Mayor Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol wrote on X.

He made clear there were no other victims other than the attacker.

Two separate investigations have been opened, one into the fire at the synagogue and another into the circumstances of the death of the individual killed by the police, Rouen prosecutors said.

Such an investigation by France’s police inspectorate general is automatic whenever an individual is killed by the police.

The man threatened a police officer with a knife and the latter used his service weapon, said the Rouen prosecutor.

The dead man was not immediately identified, a police source said.

Asked by AFP, the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office said that it is currently assessing whether it will take up the case.

France has the largest Jewish community of any country after Israel and the United States, as well as Europe’s largest Muslim community.

There have been tensions in France in the wake of the October 7th attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on Israel, followed by the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

Red hand graffiti was painted onto France’s Holocaust Memorial earlier this week, prompted anger including from President Emmanuel Macron who condemned “odious anti-Semitism”.

“Attempting to burn a synagogue is an attempt to intimidate all Jews. Once again, there is an attempt to impose a climate of terror on the Jews of our country. Combating anti-Semitism means defending the Republic,” Yonathan Arfi, the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF). wrote on X.

France was hit from 2015 by a spate of Islamist attacks that also hit Jewish targets. There have been isolated attacks in recent months and France’s security alert remains at its highest level.