A sniffer dog helped police at a Malpensa airport in Milan make the discovery. The wheelchair user was pretending to be disabled and the Financial Guard police found the drugs stuffed into the upholstery of the wheelchair. The man was immediately arrested, police said. The dog unit patrolled the airport and checked arriving passengers and their luggage from the flight from the Dominican Republic, a widely used drug smuggling route. When the dog drew officers’ attention to the wheelchair, police searched the luggage but found nothing. They then cut open the upholstery of the wheelchair and found cocaine. Police said when the discovery was made, the user, a Hispanic man, had gotten out of the wheelchair and was walking unaided. In total, 11 packages of cocaine were seized, weighing 13.25 kilograms (25.2 pounds) and could have made 27,000 individual doses, police said. The street value of the bust is around €1.4m (£1.2m).
