Chilean police seize cocaine disguised as onions

Chilean police Tuesday seized a 33-kilo shipment of cocaine disguised as onions.

Alerted to a possible case of drug smuggling from Peru, Chile's Investigative Police and customs officials in the northern border city of Arica searched a refrigerated truck transporting 1,350 mesh sacks of onions.

Buried under the cargo were three sacks containing 121 suspicious- looking large white onions wrapped in plastic. A closer inspection showed the "onions" were actually plastic-wrapped balls of cocaine dipped in mustard and covered with real onion skin.

The fake onions were "almost identical" to the real thing, Chilean daily El Mercurio Online reported.

Arica customs officials had to put the fake cargo through an X-ray machine, which detected a difference in density between the packed cocaine and the vegetable, the daily said. Endi