Dog sniffs out £20m drugs
By Colin Harding

A COCKER spaniel is the toast of Peru this weekend after breaking up a South
American gang attempting to smuggle drugs with a street value of £20 million
into Europe.

When customs officers at Peru's main port, El Callao, became suspicious
about an unclaimed container from Colombia, they sent for Sophie, a British
sniffer dog.

Sophie, a product of the Lancashire Constabulary's Dog Training Centre in
Preston, presented to the Peruvian government by Britain three years ago,
led them to almost 20 tons of cannabis.

The drug was compressed into hundreds of 2.5kg blocks and hidden among the
cargo of Colombian textiles and crockery listed on the ship's manifest. It
was Peru's biggest drugs bust.

Sophie and its handler, Victor Loyola, were trained together at an
eightweek course in Preston in 1994 and have been working as a team in
Peruvian customs' special operations brigade ever since. The head of the
Preston centre, Insp Phil Williams, who trained Sophie, visited Peru last
year and found the bitch in good shape.

Sniffer dogs are widely used in antidrug operations, in South America and
elsewhere, and most of them come from Preston. Insp Williams hesitates to
say that his centre is the best in the world, but he does concede that
clients keep coming back for more.

British gundog breeds, such as spaniels and labradors, make the best sniffer
dogs, he says: they are small, compact, amenable to training and also work
well with different kinds of people. Sophie, like all the dogs that go
through the Preston course, was trained to sniff out all the main drugs, so
cannabis presented no problem. But it was not what its handler had been
expecting to find. Peru and Colombia are the world's leading producers of
coca leaves, the raw material for cocaine.

But cannabis seems to be making a comeback there: the Peruvian police have
seized more than 130 tons of it so far this year. A big Americanbacked
crackdown on coca leaf production has disrupted the cocaine business.
Cannabis is a ready substitute: easy for small farmers to grow, and with
promising new markets.

Peruvian police believe that Sophie's container, waiting to be loaded on a
ship bound for Bosnia, was intended for Russia and its former satellites,
where the local mafia have forged links with South American drug suppliers.

The former Soviet bloc is also a growth area for the Preston dog training
centre: it is helping with a project to create a school for drug sniffer dog
instructors in Hungary, and there is an invitation to send advisers to a
similar centre in Uzbekistan.