Police find nearly 1,000 pounds of cocaine hidden in banana shipment

Police intercepted 847 pounds of cocaine in a shipment of bananas this weekend.

A worker at a wholesale company in Leverkusen, Germany, reported the suspected drugs to authorities on Saturday, the Associated Press reports.

Officials responded to the tip and found drugs stored in hundreds of 1-kilogram packets within 26 cases of bananas that arrived in the city from Ecuador. Ecuador is a major transit hub for the drug, which is often used by smugglers who hide their products inside commercial shipping containers.

Police also found a GPS transmitter in one of the cases, which they said may be used to find the shipment once it arrived in a large warehouse.

Though it's not immediately evident how much the 384-kilogram packets is worth, it is estimated that a gram of cocaine costs between 46 and 91 euros in Europe.

This isn't the first incident in which bananas were used to hide drugs.

Last year in Spain, two incidents yielded over 2,000 pounds of cocaine hidden inside banana shipments — both real and fake ones. Two incidents in Germany in 2014 and 2015 yielded more than 1,100 pounds of the drug.