Nativity Scene Yields Cocaine Cache in Madrid
- Share via
MADRID — Four Colombian men were arrested after Spanish police made an unusual holiday haul--a 12-figure Nativity scene filled with 6.6 pounds of pressed cocaine worth $2 million.
Police said Saturday that agents had discovered the drug inside the infant Jesus, the Virgin Mary and other Nativity figures.
Agents followed a Colombian man suspected of being a major contact in drug-smuggling operations to Madrid’s Barajas Airport on Thursday, police said. There, they said he met a suspected drug courier arriving on a flight from Bogota, Colombia.
The two then went to an apartment in Madrid where police later found the Nativity scene along with $52,631 in cash, which they also seized.
Police said Luis Eduardo Fernandez Quijano, 21, and Jorge Enrique Restrepo Jaramillo, 49, were arrested on drug-trafficking charges along with two other men who were not identified.
More From the Los Angeles Times
Podcasts
Author and CBS News correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti attempts to answer some questions about rebuilding communities in his new book about the Palisades Fire — and names a motive for a quick rebuild: the Olympic games coming to Los Angeles in 2028.
Today we discuss one of the pivotal events of the 1960s: the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Though the gunman was caught at the scene, confessed at trial, and even bragged about the shooting, his motives have largely been forgotten.
Modern LA earned its first smoggy nickname 450 years ago, as the “bay of smokes.” At the La Brea tar pits, we take a short walk through a long history with curator Regan Dunn, who explains how and why the first Angelenos would have set fires that filled the broad bowl of LA and foretold the curse of smog.
