Spainish officials have found nearly 2,000 pounds of cocaine stuffed in backpacks that were sent floating along the Mediterranean coast between Malaga and Valencia.
Authorities told CNN that the suspects used a floatation system to keep the backpacks from sinking.
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Spain's Civil Guard captured 37 of the backpacks Monday with
cocaine off the Valencia beach, the Associated Press reported.
Police had been investigating the crime since May and recently made five arrests. The Civil Guard seized $97,000, three vehicles and vessels in the raids.
The floating backpack crime is the latest in a long list of creative methods drug lords are using to distribute cocaine, marijuana, heroin and other contraband items. In a report last May,
NBC News reported that a Panamanian woman traveling from Colombia to Spain in December 2012 was found to have three pounds of cocaine in her breast implants.
Last May, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Field Operations officers in Texas discovered 591 pounds of marijuana hidden inside plaster figurines, columns and other items imported from Mexico, valued at nearly a half million dollars.
Last year, Customs and Border Protection agents also found 2,000 jalapeno cans filled with marijuana in Nogales, Ariz.; 300 pounds of weed inside hay bales in a pickup truck in Del Rio, Texas; and three pounds of crystal meth tied to a man's inner thighs in Salton City, Calif., NBC News reported.
In March, 2013, a Brazilian man dressed as a woman was stopped after flight authorities found three pounds of cocaine strapped to his buttocks with padded underwear, along with a cellphone containing his contacts in Brussels.
In September 2012, John F. Kennedy Airport customs officers in New York found four pounds of cocaine under the wigs of two women arriving from Guyana after authorities noticed bulges during a pat down, NBC News reported.
In 2011, a South Carolina state trooper found a packet of cocaine in the leg prosthesis of a man authorities stopped. The drug was jammed between the artificial limb and the man's upper leg.
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