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The Costa Blanca and Costa Calida Le@der reports...

Cocaine ALLEGEDLY bound for the Costa Blanca and with a street value estimated at €1billion has been seized by British detectives and Gambian police and twelve suspected traffickers have been arrested in connection with the stash, thought to be the biggest ever seized in West Africa.

A total of two-and-a-half tonnes of the Class A drug was found in a warehouse near Gambia's capital of Banju after a joint investigation by Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) and Gambian authorities plus a significant amount of money was seized, along with 85 sacks of cocaine. The cocaine was discovered over a weekend behind a false wall at the warehouse basement, it emerged last week and an undisclosed number of empty sacks believed to have contained cocaine were found at the warehouse.

West Africa has become a major transit point for Latin American narcotics as smugglers take advantage of the region's poverty and weak surveillance by authorities to ferry drugs into southern Europe. After initial arrests were made in connection with the drugs trade in mid-May, Gambian police enlisted the help of Soca. A spokesman said: 'The Gambian authorities already had a grasp on this case. We were merely called in as a support role for them and provided them with forensic assistance and advised them. We were closely monitoring the warehouse where the stash was found for some time and assisted the police after they had already identified the place as suspicious.

Often referred to as the British FBI, Soca is an intelligence-led agency often called in to assist by anti-crime authorities around the world. Those arrested before and during the raid included Latin Americans, Africans and Europeans, a security source said.

Meanwhile on Friday afternoon twelve people from one family, all Spanish and between 25 and 44 years of age, were arrested in their homes and businesses in the hamlet of La Murada Orihuela  and charged with the distribution of drugs, cocaine and hashish, throughout the Vega Baja. The arrests were the culmination of two months of investigation by the National Police.

Among the items seized from five homes there were two computers , 25 grams of cocaine, 145 marijuana , 40 grams of seeds of hemp plants , other 3.7 of hashish and ecstasy tablets eleven and 370 grams of various other substances used to manipulate the drug. There was also 5,200 euro in notes and a shotgun whose ownership has yet to be clarified.