Spanish police have arrested three people after breaking up a ring that allegedly smuggled hundreds of kilos of cocaine into Europe by disguising it as charcoal and ridding the drug of its telltale scent to render it undetectable to sniffer dogs, writes The Guardian.

Officers from Spain’s national police and Portugal’s judicial police began investigating at the beginning of 2020 after noticing that a trading company was using a variety of front organizations to carry out suspicious imports that did not tally with their supposed business operations.

They traced the business back to a well-known Basque drug trafficker who had once spent 11 months under arrest in Bolivia.

Close surveillance then led the Portuguese authorities to a port where the contents of two containers of charcoal tested positive for cocaine.

Officers discovered the gang had placed 30 sacks of “cocaine charcoal” among 1,364 sacks of real charcoal to make detection more difficult.

Fifty Spanish and Portuguese officers tracked the two containers as they were taken by lorry from Portugal to northern Spain, where their contents were due to be separated and the cocaine recovered in a laboratory.

As soon as the lorries arrived at the gang’s base on an industrial estate in the town of Medina del Campo, in Spain’s northern Castilla y León region, the police moved in, arrested three people and seized 862 kilos of cocaine.