Commissioner of Police believes Department has done more to deter successful drug plane landings

By Aaron Humes: Despite two planes successfully landing in less than 24 hours this week, Commissioner of Police Chester Williams credits his Department with ensuring that there were not more.

The Joint Intelligence Operation Center (JIOC) monitored four tracks over two days, on Monday and Tuesday, of which one flew over without landing while the second had to similarly maneuvre before successfully landing in the area of Fireburn behind Carmelita village, Orange Walk District. Police had teams in place monitoring several potential landing sites.

As we have previously reported, police had a team in place at Carmelita but on their way to intercept the plane someone maliciously placed spikes on the road, flattening their tires and delaying them by as much as three hours. By the time another vehicle could come to assist and they got to the area, the plane was found without its lucrative cargo.

The jet that was recovered has a known payload of 1,700 pounds but may have been overloaded by 2 to 3 hundred pounds more. The Commissioner suspects that if they didn’t have vehicular resources to move the cargo, they could have used the Rio Hondo which flows past Botes on the Mexican side.

As to where the drugs and cargo might be, the Commissioner said, “We believe the narco-traffickers are within that Carmelita area. There are a couple of them who operates out of Carmelita, we know who they are and those are the persons we are looking for. As a matter of fact, we had gone to their homes [on Tuesday] as I had directed the team to make sure we go to their homes yesterday morning to see if they were there and they were not at home, so that again says something that they could be involved and are still out in the fields dealing with the cargo.”

In the case of the second plane, on Tuesday morning two tracks were monitored in the Toledo District. One flew over without landing while the second hovered first over the Bladen area for 20 minutes, then the Kanantik area for ten minutes before ultimately landing in the Graham Creek area near the Belize-Guatemala border.

As of this writing that landing has not officially been confirmed, but the Commissioner said he “believe[s] with all certainty that the plane did land in the Graham Creek area [Wednesday morning] and when these planes come, they don’t have one landing spot, they have several proposed landing spots, so if one area failed, they move to another, if that failed, they go to another. So in most cases, they have up to 3 landing spots and that is the case we believe with the one last night, the primary might have been Bladen, the secondary could have been Kanantik and then the tertiary is where it eventually landed in the Graham Creek area.”

The potential size of the cargo aboard is also not known at this time.

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