The port of Agadir where the shipment was found A joint security force of police and customs officials in the south-west Moroccan port of Agadir on Sunday uncovered over eight tonnes of dope resin, hidden in the belly of a whale. The contraband was apparently being smuggled to Europe, to be sold in British drug markets. The shipment was loaded with 21 tonnes of fish.
A security source said on Sunday that the container was transported from the city of Laayoune by truck. It then waited near the port of Agadir for two days, until it could board an export vessel.
Sources at Agadir port said: "Discovering the drug shipment was greatly due to luck. The drugs were not showing up clearly on the cargo screening scanners, showing the presence of an unidentified  black material. Upon being searched by security officials, the drugs were found carefully wrapped in octopi to hide them."
The discovery led to drug enforcement officers search all the cargo at the port, which took several hours, from Sunday until after Iftaar (breaking of the Ramadan fast in the evening) on Monday.
The driver of the truck the contained the drugs was arrested, while investigations are ongoing to expose the entire network.
Last weekend, a stash of 3.78 tonnes of hashish was seized in the port of Casablanca in a container filled with mosaics headed for the Belgian city of Antwerp.  The port of Tangier has also been the scene of some major hashish seizure operations, including one that led to the discovery of 9 tonnes of the drug last April in a truck bound for Spain.
Morocco is one of the leading producers of hashish in the world.  Authorities are reluctant to give figures for the drug’s production, but the Interior Ministry has said that the fight against cannabis plant cultivation, from which hashish is extracted, has reduced the size of the crop from 134,000 hectares in 2003 to only 47,000 in 2011.