5 Arrested in Sydney after drugs worth $163m found in kayaks

Five people have been arrested following a joint Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS) operation that stopped 183 kg of methamphetamine from entering Australia, AFP said on Wednesday. The drugs worth about 180 million AU dollars (163 million U.S. dollars) were hidden in a shipment of Kayaks from China. The four men and one woman were arrested on Tuesday in the Sydney suburbs of Hillsdale and Kensington over the drug haul. On February 5, ACBPS officers at the Sydney Container Examination Facility selected a container from China for x-ray inspection and found the drug. The examination revealed 19 of the 27 kayaks contained packages with methamphetamine inside. On Tuesday, the AFP conducted a controlled delivery of the container to a Sydney storage facility in Hillsdale in Sydney's south, where they arrested three man and one woman, all from China 's Taiwan. The AFP later arrested a 32-year-old man at his Kensington home following further investigations. The five are scheduled to appear in Sydney Local Court on Wednesday. The maximum penalty for these offenses is life imprisonment, the AFP said. ACBPS Regional Director NSW, Tim Fitzgerald, said the arrests were a joint effort by ACBPS and the AFP. "By working with the Australian Federal Police, we have again stopped criminals seeking to damage our communities," he said. The AFP says it is coordinating with its law enforcement partners in China and China's Taiwan through its international network as part of ongoing investigations into this matter.