Spanish woman arrested at Chile airport with 9,000 Ecstasy tablets

Chilean authorities arrested a Spanish woman who had more than 9,000 Ecstasy tablets in her possession at Santiago’s international airport, the Investigations Police of Chile (PDI) said Friday.

The suspect, initially identified as Riana Soza, arrived in the Chilean capital on a flight from Brussels with stopovers in Amsterdam and Rome, the chief of the PDI’s anti-narcotics unit at the Santiago airport, Juan Figueroa, told reporters.

Figueroa said the woman was carrying 9,147 tablets of Ecstasy - a psychoactive, dance-club drug whose chemical name is MDMA - hidden in muscle stimulation belts.

It was the first time that smuggling method had been seen at the Santiago airport, where drugs are usually found in luggage, air cargo or mailed packages.

The Ecstasy consignment, estimated to have a street value of 200 million pesos (around $296,000), apparently was to be sold at electronic music festivals that become more frequent as the Southern Hemisphere’s summer approaches.

Authorities at that same airport made Chile’s biggest-ever synthetic drugs seizure on Oct. 1 when they found 30,000 Ecstasy tablets brought in on a flight from the Netherlands and arrested two male suspects, a Chilean and a Dominican.