Supermarket finds cocaine in bananas shipped to Poland

Grocery clerks in Poland have discovered bricks of cocaine hidden among bananas shipped from Ecuador to a local supermarket chain, police said on Monday.

"We've confiscated over 160 kilograms (350 pounds) of what appears to be cocaine that was shipped from Ecuador," officer Dawid Marciniak, a spokesman for Poland's national police headquarters, told AFP.

Employees found cocaine bricks covered by bananas inside boxes shipped to various outlets of a Polish supermarket chain," Marciniak said.

Marciniak said that the largest of the bricks weighed up to one kilogram, but declined to provide further details, citing the ongoing investigation.

"There are obviously many questions we need to answer, namely who ordered these shipments?" Marciniak said, adding that no arrests had been made so far.

With local media reporting that the street value of a single gram of cocaine runs up to 500 zloty (116 euro, USD 132) in Poland, the haul could be worth upwards of 80 million zloty (18.6 million euros, USD 21 million).

Unconfirmed Polish media reports indicate that employees at the "Stokrotka" (Daisy) supermarket chain began finding plastic-wrapped bricks of cocaine this weekend as they were unpacking shipments of bananas.

Stokrotka supermarkets are a subsidiary of the Maxima Group, a Lithuanian retail chain operating some 500 grocery and other stores in the three Baltic states plus Bulgaria and Poland.