Customs Seize Opium In Raid On Freighter

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28415, 23 October 1957, Page 12

Customs Seize Opium In Raid On Freighter

(New Zealand. Press Association)

AUCKLAND, October 22.

About 301 b of opium and a smaller quantity of other drugs suspected to be heroin and marijuana were seized by Auckland Customs officers this afternoon in a raid on the passenger freighter Eastern Star at Captain Cook wharf. The opium would sell at black market for about £4500.

Mr C. V. O’Connor, chief boarding inspector in Auckland, said that if tests confirmed that the white powder found in some packets was heroin, it would be the first time this drug had been discovered in a New Zealand port.

The drugs, wrapped in rubber bags and paper packets, were cunningly concealed in a narrow 50ft high shaft between bulkheads which divide the ship’s engineroom and passenger accommodation.

Thirty customs officers searched the ship shortly after she docked last Friday on arrival from Hong Kong. They found a number of binoculars and watches. Three officers, Messrs B. Lake, R. Porter and V. Buckley, were continuing the search today when they noticed a piece of blue ribbon protruding from the edge of a ventilator pipe high up in the shaft between the bulkheads. Mr Lake, the smallest of the three, inched his way up the

narrow vertical shaft. About 40ft up, he found what was clearly a large cache of smuggled goods. Reaching them only with great difficulty, he began throwing them down to his companions. Small packets of opium, cartons of cigarettes and other articles, including blouses and binoculars, came showering down to the waiting Customs officers. A dozen small paper packets of a gritty pinkish brown substance were carefully examined by Mr O’Connor. He said the packets definitely contained some other narcotic—possibly marijuana or Indian hemp.

Then came another find—two packets, each containing about five ounces of a white powder. “This- looks like heroin,” he said.

“This has been our biggest haul of narcotics for many years.’’ Mr O’Connor said. “The officers who found it deserve great credit.”

The Eastern Star is owned by the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company and runs regularly between New Zealand. Australia, Hong Kong and Japan.