More than 300 kilos of hashish seized at airport

With help from sniffer dog, drug found in boxes sent from Pakistan

Canada Border Services Agency recently seized more than 300 kilograms of hashish found in air cargo that came off a passenger flight at Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport in Dorval.

The seizure was made by CBSA officers on May 8 after they inspected 18 cardboard boxes sent from Lahore, Pakistan, and destined for an address in Montreal. The contents of the boxes were declared to be the soles of shoes. But when the search was done, the officers found coffee bags containing a pasty brown substance. Tests have since revealed the substance was 344 kilograms of hashish, said Jacqueline Roby, a CBSA spokeswoman.

Roby said normally such large seizures of hashish are made at the Port of Montreal, in containers sent by ship. She said officers noticed abnormalities on some of the boxes and further investigated the shipment by having it X-rayed.

A sniffer dog was then called in to see if it could detect the smell of drugs. The dog provided the final test, confirming for officers that they had indeed discovered an attempt to smuggle the illegal drug into Canada.

The hashish has since been turned over to the RCMP for an investigation and no arrests have been made so far.

Border services officers have made 1,342 drug seizures in Quebec so far this year. That is more than the amount of seizures the federal officers made in Quebec — 1,232 — in 2013 and 2014 combined. Roby said it is difficult to compare one year from another because in some cases, CBSA officers will seize much larger amounts but with less frequency from one year to the next.