Hard labour for police

POLICE had to smash up nearly 19 tonnes of rock with sledgehammers to find 785 packages of cocaine that had been disguised as stone.

Officers had learned that a shipment of 188,000 kilos of stone was being used to smuggle the drug into Spain.

The cocaine had been mixed with a rocky mixture that, when set, made it indistinguishable from the stones in the shipment. National Police officers had no option but to roll their sleeves up, grab sledgehammers and do some serious hard labour to find the drugs packages – each one of which held more than a kilo of cocaine.

Online calls for “prisoners to be brought in to do the job” were ignored.

Eleven people – all Colombians and Venezuelans – were arrested in the operation in Humanes de Madrid.