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LONDON — A person who died after going into convulsions on a flight from Colombia to Japan was discovered to have swallowed 246 tiny packages of cocaine, officers stated.
The aircraft, an Aeromexico flight from Bogotá to Tokyo, made an emergency touchdown very early Friday morning at Hermosillo airport within the Mexican state of Sonora after the person, a 42-year-old Japanese citizen, turned sick, in accordance with a press release from the state prosecutor’s workplace there on Monday. He died earlier than medical assist might attain him, the prosecutor’s workplace stated.
An post-mortem discovered that he had 246 plastic parcels of lower than an inch lengthy in his abdomen and bowels, the assertion stated. It decided that his loss of life had been brought on by a surge in blood stress, the outcome of a drug overdose, most likely after one of the parcels ruptured. The man’s title was given within the assertion solely as Udo N.
The grim discovery was a reminder of the worldwide demand for leisure medication, and of the intense strategies traffickers undertake to fulfill it. Recent experiences on the United States’ southern border have detailed smuggling by strategies as mundane as mules with backpacks, and as elaborate as catapults and compressed-air weapons.
But it additionally highlighted an growing drawback in Colombia. According to knowledge from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, seizures of cocaine in Colombia have elevated sharply prior to now decade. In 2016, the final accessible determine, greater than 1,100 tons of the drug had been seized.
And, in a report launched final 12 months, the company stated Colombia had extra land used to make cocaine than ever in its historical past, at 422,550 acres by the tip of 2017. Despite a 2016 peace deal between the federal government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, that additionally sought to discourage the unlawful drug commerce, the quantity of land used to provide coca leaf has gone up on common about 45 % a 12 months since 2013, the report stated.
The remaining 198 passengers on board the Aeromexico flight Friday night continued their journey to Japan.
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