The Philippine Online Chronicles

A bag containing 16kg of cocaine was found in the mailroom of the United Nations headquarters in New York on 16 January, police said last week.

The drugs were in a bag with a low-quality print of the UN logo, which raised suspicions when it was scanned, Paul Browne, chief spokesman for the New York Police Department, told the Associated Press. Bags marked thus, or diplomatic bags, are immune from inspection.

Browne added that there was no name or address on the package, which came from Mexico City, Mexico through Cincinnati, Ohio via DHL Express.

"It is my understanding that because there was no addressee, the DHL just thought, 'Well that's the UN symbol, so we should ship it on to UN headquarters and let them figure out who it was supposed to go to'," Browne said in a statement.

Inside the bags were hardcover books hollowed out to hide the illegal drug.

UN assistant secretary general Gregory Starr told the AFP there was no evidence to link anyone at the UN to the bags.

"In my humble opinion this was the work of narcotics traffickers that were trying to ship something into the United States and their plan must have gone wrong," said Starr, who is in charge of UN security.

Photo by Steve Cadman. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.