As many as 26 pilots and flight attendants, as well as 11 cleaners, have been arrested by Bolivian police after $285,000 of narcotics was found stuffed in ovens and waste carts on a commercial plane that was due to depart Santa Cruz on Sunday night.
According to local media reports, officers from Bolivia’s Special Force to Fight Drug Trafficking (FELCN) carried out a raid on the Airbus A330 operated by the country’s flag carrier Boliviana de Aviación (BoA).
Flight OB776 was due to depart Santa Cruz at around 8:15 pm on Sunday, but the flight had to be delayed into the early hours of the morning after FELCN agents swept the plane for drugs.
Officers were initially called to the aircraft after the crew found two suspicious packages. A search then revealed 12 packages of drugs that had been hidden in ovens and in waste carts.
The crew, as well as other airport staffers who had access to the aircraft, have been taken into custody as the investigation gets underway.
In the end, BoA ended up canceling a regularly scheduled flight from Santa Cruz to Miami and using the crew from that flight to operate the Madrid-bound service.
Earlier this month, an ex-American Airlines mechanic was found guilty of trying to smuggle more than $320,000 worth of cocaine into the United States by hiding it in a special compartment under the cockpit of a plane that flew from Montego Bay, Jamaica, to New York.
Paul Belloisi was convicted for his role in the drug smuggling plot last year and has now been sentenced to 108 months in federal prison.
Belloisi’s crime was only discovered by chance when Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers conducted a random enforcement check of an American Airlines plane at New York JFK on February 4, 2020.
Inside the avionics bay, they found ten bricks of cocaine, which they quickly removed and replaced with dummy drugs as part of a sting operation. With just minutes before the plane was due to depart for its next flight, officers witnessed Belloisi approach the plane and remove the packages from the compartment.
This isn’t the first time that a BoA plane has been used to transport illegal drugs to Madrid, and officials are still investigating an incident in February 2023 when half a tonne of drugs was found on a BoA aircraft that had just landed in the Spanish capital.
