Cocaine stash washes up on beach

A BAG filled with what is suspected to be cocaine worth about R9 million washed up on Mossel Bay’s Hartenbos beach on Christmas Day.

A lifeguard saw the bundle floating just beyond the surf break around 4.30pm.

“He first thought it was someone in the water,” said Mossel Bay Lifesaving Club chairman Warren Prins, who is also the president of Eden Lifesaving.

“When he checked with binoculars, he saw it was some kind of object.”

The lifeguard went into the water to retrieve it and found a black bag attached to a rope and a “big drum”.

Inside the bag were 25 packets, each weighing more than 1kg. Police said it seemed to be cocaine.

Police spokeswoman Bernadine Steyn said the packets would be sent to a laboratory in Cape Town to check if they were cocaine.

If they were, she said the haul would have an estimated street value of about R8.75m.

How the bag ended up bobbing in the water at Hartenbos is a mystery.

Asked if they had suspects or clues, Steyn said she could not “divulge information under investigation”.

Prins had his own suspicions about how the bag ended up in the water near the beach.

“I think it was probably a drop-off. It could have been that the guys got spooked or the currents took it away,” he said. “Even the slightest of currents could have carried it away.”

Prins, who also works in law enforcement, believed it would be difficult to find a suspect linked to such an unusual discovery.

It was the first time they had encountered such an incident.

“It was a big surprise. Especially because it was such a big bag that was floating out in the open. The value of it is quite shocking,” he said.

The beach had been busy on Christmas Day and although the lifeguard team had tried to be subtle about recovering what was later found to be suspected contraband, the incident had drawn quite a lot of attention once the police were called in.

“The police came and people started gathering around to see what was happening,” said Prins.