FRENCH CUSTOMS SEIZE RECORD ECSTASY DRUGS HAUL

PARIS, March 30 (Reuters) - A routine spot check on a British truck near
the Channel port of Dunkirk yielded France's biggest seizure of ecstasy
drugs, French customs said on Tuesday.

The drugs haul, made last Friday, was worth more than 92 million francs
($15 million).

Drugs seized included 580,000 ecstasy tablets, almost 40 kilos (88 lb) of
cocaine and hundreds of kilos of cannabis and cannabis resin.

The drugs were hidden among pallets of wine in the lorry, which was driven
by a British national and had passed through the Netherlands and Germany
with a load from Belgium.

"We have intercepted a million and a half ecstasy tablets in a year just in
the Dunkirk region," senior customs officer Rene-Claude Philippe told the
newspaper Le Parisien.

Customs officers swooped on the British lorry which had pulled over at a
rest stop on the A16 motorway.

French customs have come to regard the motorway, which opened two years ago
and links Belgium with France's Channel port towns of Dunkirk and Calais,
as a drugs highway from the Netherlands into Britain.

($16.102 French Franc)