Operation Yadra Viti, which is being carried out in Navosa, netted more than 10,000 marijuana plants with a street value estimated at $111 million, making it the biggest drug raid in the country’s history, according to police.
Fiji police spokesman Atunaisa Sokomuri said the plants were uprooted from more than 20 farms located in the upper reaches of the Sigatoka River within the borders of Navosa and Ba province.
“We tracked through the jungles using maps and compass and were helped with knowledge of the local terrain by our officers at Keiyasi,” he said.
“At one farm, they were packing and ran when they saw us coming. “What we found was surprising, especially the size of the plants and the amount.”
The plants averaged between six and 10 feet tall and were tested by the government analyst who is also camped out in the jungle with the team.
Six men from Vatubalavu and Draiba villages were arrested and questioned by police at Keiyasi Police Station.
According to Sokomuri, soldiers fired warning shots when the startled growers ran away into the jungle.
Operation Yadra Viti took two months of planning and involved more than 200 police officers and soldiers who carried out raids in the Northern, Central and Eastern divisions.
For Navosa alone, there were 100 police officers and a platoon of 10 armed soldiers.
“We had been led to believe that the people of Navosa had given up drug cultivation but after observing crime statistics we soon discovered drugs were involved in most of the criminal activities that are happening,” Viti said.
“We also acted on the information received from our police sources in the area but did not receive any complaint from any of the villages in Navosa.”
The officers were divided into cultivating, arresting and processing teams with the whole operation coordinated from the Keiyasi Police Station.
“We went in with soldiers because we knew we were walking into multi-million-dollar drug farms and we expected resistance,” Viti said.
“We will start at the root of the problem, the cultivators, and we hope that the farmers will lead us to the buyers, the middlemen and from then forth to the outlets in the urban centers,” he added.
The drug raids in Vanua Levu turned up nothing, leading police to suspect that some of their own officers tipped off the farmers before they could reach them.
