A MAN whose hairstyle aroused suspicion when he landed at Barcelona airport turned out to be carrying half a kilo of cocaine underneath his toupée.
The Colombian national, who had arrived on a flight from Bogotá, was thought to be acting nervously when he passed through immigration – but it was the unfeasible height and shape of his hair that made customs officers decide to search him.
He was wearing a toupée on top of his bald patch with a plastic-wrapped package containing 503 grams of the drug glued to his head.
As it was obvious he was wearing a wig, officers ordered him to remove it and seized his illicit haul.
This poor attempt at concealment is one of the many creative ways smugglers have attempted to get drugs into Spain, mainly from Colombia but also from other parts of Latin America.
A decade ago, a man arrived from Chile at Barcelona airport in a wheelchair, with a broken leg, and it turned out his plaster cast was made of cocaine.
In December 2012, a 20-year-old woman from Panamá arriving in Barcelona on a flight from Bogotá was operated on urgently after officials found she had bags of cocaine sewn inside her breasts as 'implants', seeing that the recent surgical wounds, still bleeding, were leaking white powder.
An identical case was reported two years later at Madrid airport when a 43-year-old Venezuelan woman arrived via a connecting flight from Bogotá with breast implants made of cocaine.
A year before, a Colombian passenger with packages strapped to his stomach admitted he had swallowed 35 condoms containing cocaine.
At around the same time, a Senegalese passenger on a flight to Madrid was arrested and given emergency medical attention after he started vomiting up what looked like whole hard-boiled eggs whilst on the plane, and which turned out to be cocaine he had swallowed and which had burst inside him.
He survived, although miraculously, given the amount of the drug in him would have been enough to kill him if he had not vomited it out.
Photograph by the National Police at Barcelona airport
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