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- One of the longest cross-border drugs-smuggling tunnels between Mexico and the US has been found by authorities in San Diego, American officials say.
- They say the 800m (874 yards) tunnel was used to transport an "unprecedented cache" of cocaine and marijuana.
- It was the 13th sophisticated secret tunnel found along California's border with Mexico since 2006.
- But a local official described it as "ingenious" and unlike anything seen before.
- Three have been found on the same short street in San Diego that runs parallel to a border fence with Mexico.
- In the latest incident about 1,016kg (2,242lb) of cocaine and 6,350kg of marijuana suspected of being transported through the tunnel was seized, officials say.
- "This is the largest cocaine seizure ever associated with a tunnel," Southern California District Attorney Laura Duffy said, and is the second "super tunnel" to be discovered in recent weeks,
- In March, authorities uncovered a 380m tunnel that ran from a restaurant in Mexico to a house in California.
- The latest tunnel ran at a depth of 14m (46ft) from the bottom of an elevator shaft built into a house in Tijuana to a hole in the ground on the American side enclosed within a fenced-in lot set up as a pallet business.
- The hole was hidden under a trailer-sized rubbish bin that smugglers used to move the drugs from the lot, federal officials said.
- "They put the drugs in the dumpster and then hauled the dumpster to another location to unload it," Ms Duffy said.
- Federal agents followed a truck that took the bin to a central San Diego location about 40km (25 miles) north of the border and witnessed the cargo being loaded onto a box truck, which drove away.
- San Diego County sheriff's deputies then stopped the truck and seized the drugs, arresting three men in the process.
- Ms Duffy said that federal agents searching the pallet lot and the tunnel recovered additional supplies of marijuana and arrested three more suspects.
- The tunnel used in the operation was sophisticated, The Los Angeles Times reported, and had a ventilation system and lighting. On the Tijuana side, the tunnel was connected to an elevator that ascended into the house.
- "I think it fair to say that few would suspect that traffickers were moving multi-ton quantities of cocaine and marijuana in this very unassuming way, in full view of the world around them," the paper quoted Ms Duffy as saying.
- "It's a rabbit hole,'' she said of the latest tunnel to be found.
- "Just the whole way that it comes up right out into the open is a bit ingenious. It's something completely different than what we've seen before."
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