Police and customs officers in Spain have intercepted 2.6 tonnes of cocaine from Ghana packed inside wooden coconut crates, arresting two men after quietly tracking the shipment from Valencia to a warehouse in Almería.
Spanish authorities disclosed the bust on Wednesday, November 11, tracing the cargo to two containers loaded at Tema Port on August 2. When the boxes reached Valencia 20 days later, customs officials and the Guardia Civil singled them out as presenting a "high risk of drug trafficking".
False bottoms built into the wooden crates hid packages of white powder that tested positive for cocaine.
Investigators took the drugs out, sealed both containers back up and kept watch. Two refrigerated lorries soon arrived to collect the load.
Officers trailed them to a warehouse at the La Juaida industrial estate in Almería and moved in as the crates came off, detaining the suspected importer and the man supervising the unloading.
Hard questions at Tema Port
The Almería arrests add to a troubling run of overseas busts tied to Ghanaian exports.
In September 2026, French customs at Dunkirk found nearly 3.9 tonnes of cocaine worth about €225 million, or US$261 million, inside a plastic waste container from Ghana.
The Narcotics Control Commission (NACOC) announced three initial arrests before several more suspects were put before the courts. That probe raised uncomfortable questions about Tema Port operations after inquiries pointed to "abnormalities detected in scan images" before the containers were cleared for shipment.
Smugglers have tried passenger flights and other drugs too. On October 31, officers at Beirut's Rafic Hariri International Airport arrested a Syrian national arriving from Accra with about 40 kilogrammes of suspected cocaine in two bags.
NACOC confirmed the arrest and said it was working with Lebanese authorities to "identify and apprehend alleged accomplices in Ghana." In June 2026, Australian officials seized 320 kilogrammes of methamphetamine hidden in Ghanaian charcoal.
Pressure from European ports
European ports had already logged huge hauls from Tema across 2025. Dutch customs pulled 4.5 tonnes of cocaine from a timber consignment in Amsterdam in June 2025, reported then as the "largest in the port's history."
Belgian officers in Antwerp uncovered 2,829 kilogrammes of cocaine in cassava flour from Tema that November, followed by 1,158 kilogrammes of suspected cocaine from Ghana in December.
Belgian customs figures cited by JoyNews Research in September ranked Ghana fifth as a "country of origin" for cocaine seized at Antwerp in 2025, the lone African nation in the top five.
That classification tracks where legitimate exports sailed from rather than where the South American cocaine was made. A separate JoyNews count in September tallied 28 narcotics cases linked to Ghana since January 2025, including 11 cocaine seizures with published weights near 15.8 tonnes.
September's Dunkirk bust pushed President John Dramani Mahama to summon security chiefs and direct an interagency task force to review port and border detection systems.
Though the coconut crates left Tema a month before that order, Wednesday's disclosure puts fresh heat on cargo inspectors and intelligence units guarding Ghana's supply chains.
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