UN says Venezuelan Boeing crashes in Mali carrying cocaine

Venezuelan Minister of Interior Tareck El Aissami has announced his government will investigate the origin of an alleged drug-trafficking plane that United Nations officials said crashed in Mali.

An official from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said Monday that the plane was being used to transport cocaine from Venezuela to West Africa.

“We are looking into whether this plane did in fact originate in Venezuela,” El Aissami told local media.

On Monday, Alexandre Schmidt told journalists that the plane had come from the Latin American country.

“A Boeing coming from Venezuela landed on a makeshift landing strip some 15 kilometres (nine miles) from Gao (in Mali’s northeast) and unloaded cocaine and other illegal substances,” Schmidt told journalists in Dakar.

“The plane wanted to take off but crashed on November 5th,” he added.

However, El Aissami countered that “the plane did not have a Venezuelan registration” and questioned any evidence linking it to his country.

“The plane was simply in an accident,” he said, adding that “big networks” of US media were manipulating information to detract from Venezuela’s anti-drug policies.

“The media is using manipulation to obscure the results: arrests, seizures, constant operations,” he said.

In recent years West Africa has become an important transit point for South American cocaine being smuggled to European markets and according to Schmidt there are also signs that the region is now moving into producing drugs.