Japanese man dies on plane after ingesting 246 bags of cocaine

A man died on a plane last Friday after swallowing 246 bags of cocaine, the BBC reports.

The Japanese national, who was identified as Udo N., was en route to Japan's Narita International Airport when he suddenly began having seizures. The plane had to make an emergency landing in Mexico's Sonora state, where authorities discovered the man dead due to cerebral edema caused by a drug overdose.

The passenger's trip originally began in Bogota, Colombia, law enforcement said.

An autopsy revealed hundreds of bags of cocaine in the man's stomach and intestines, with each bag measuring 2.5-centimeters long and 1 centimeter wide, Sonora's attorney general announced in a Twitter post.

After the man's body was removed from the plane, the remaining 198 passengers on board were able to continue their journey.

Colombia is the world's biggest producer of cocaine. In fact, production hit record levels in 2017, as the BBC reported last year. Though the country has long waged a war on the drug, it has been unsuccessful due to an ineffective agreement with the Farc, a rebel group that once controlled the majority of cocaine production in Colombia, and criticism over the Colombian government's use of cancer-causing herbicide to get rid of coca — the drug's base ingredient.