A carrier pigeon has been caught with a bag full of cocaine and cannabis in a weird attempt to smuggle drugs to prisoners.
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Costa Rica Ministry of Justice and Peace/REUTERS A guard of the La Reforma Penitentiary holds a pigeon with a little bag filled with drugs attached to its chest in San Rafael de Alejuela, on the outskirts of San Jose, Costa Rica.
It had 14g of cocaine and 14g of cannabis stuffed into a black pouch which was camouflaged against its dark feathers.
“It seems the dove was trained for it”, Prison director Paul Bertozzi said.
After observing further, they decided to capture it and confirmed that bulge was indeed a zipped bag, Daily Mail reported.
You may not typically pay pigeons much attention outside of giving them the occasional suspicious side-glance whenever they try to surreptitiously cozy up to you and your delicious lunch crumbs, but their innate homing ability has made these seemingly nondescript birds ideal for carrying messages across large distances.
“This is nothing new”.
Previous attempts to use animals to smuggle drugs into prisons include cats and an iguana.
And it has now ended up in custody at an animal refuge for 40 days, as prison bosses don’t want it repeating the scam.
The bird was taken to a local zoo. Memes about the #NarcoPaloma flooded social media, with some even joking that pigeons in the country are threatening to take over if their “comrade” is not released, according to Tico Times.
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Mr Bertozzi said the pigeon was “nothing new” and that drug traffickers were using “unimaginable ways to achieve their macabre atrocities”.
