This is the explosive moment a police officer’s car, filled with £1.5 million worth of cocaine, exploded at a petrol station in Argentina.
According to Argentine news media, Sergeant Sofia Esther Chaparro’s car was filled with 20 kilos of the drug and she was with her three children at the time of the explosion.
The explosion, which sent clouds of cocaine flying into the air, took place last Wednesday in Oran, in the provincial capital Salta.
The Buenos Aires city police officer and her three children were not in the car at the time because she had stopped and gotten out at the gas station.
After the explosion, passersby said the ground around it was covered in white powder. More medicine packages wrapped in yellow paper are said to have gone up in smoke.
Security camera footage captured the scene before the explosion that spewed 20 kilos of cocaine through the gas station
Passersby said the ground around the blast was covered with the white powder after the explosion
Images show the aftermath of the explosion that spewed 20 kilos of cocaine through the gas station
Orán’s assistant prosecutor, María del Carmen Núñez, told Télam news agency: “She claimed to have taken the car from a workshop a few hours earlier and that she had gone to fill the gas tank to continue the journey back to Buenos Aires.”
Chaparro, who has been placed under house arrest, refused to testify in court.
She has since been charged with transporting narcotics. According to the Beunos Aires Herald, sources from the police internal affairs department said the sergeant was relieved of her duties while investigators tried to determine whether she acted alone or if she was part of an organization.
At the time of the incident, Chaparro was on medical leave.
Prosecutors said Chaparro owned the car jointly with her ex-husband.
Two of Chaparro’s three children are said to be disabled, prompting the prosecutor to grant her house arrest so she can continue to care for them.
Argentina’s provincial police forces are considered highly prone to corruption.
An article on Insight Crime explains that despite Argentina being considered one of the safer regions in Latin America, there is a ‘serious problem’ with corruption.
Partly due to failed past reform efforts, the country’s provincial police forces are vulnerable to organized crime.
South America accounts for 30 percent of the world’s cocaine production, but most of this does not take place in Argentina.
It is believed that Columbia uses more than half a million hectares of land to produce its coca crop, producing more than 1,000 tonnes of the drug every year, worth more than £100 billion in UK street value.
South America produces almost a third of the world’s cocaine, while Columbia produces more than a thousand tons annually
Traffickers are used to move the drug from one place to another, often disguised as another product, in the image above – power generators