Five bricks of a substance – expected to be cocaine – washed up on Freshwater Beach and South Curl Curl beach early this morning. It comes months after multiple bricks of cocaine were found on our beaches in December last year.
While it is 1 April, this is not an April Fools joke.
Volunteers doing a beach clean up with Emu Parade found the first three “very suss bricks wrapped in tape” on Freshwater beach, which was shortly followed by South Curl Curl Surf Life Saving Club reporting an additional two suspicious bricks after they were handed in by a member of the public.
A total of five kilograms has now been seized by police.
“About 7.30am today (Monday 1 April 2024), police were notified three suspicious packages had been located at Sydney’s Northern Beaches,” a police spokesperson said at 2pm this afternoon.
“About 8.25am, police were notified two further packages had been found. Officers attached to Northern Beaches Police Area Command seized the items, which will be forensically examined. Police from Marine Area Command conducted patrols with no further finds. As inquiries continue, the public are reminded to report any suspicious package to authorities.”
Witnesses at South Curl Curl beach told Manly Observer that a member of the public discovered two packages wrapped in black duct tape early this morning on the beach north of the life saving club.
They handed the packages to a South Curl Curl Surf Life Saver as the life guards weren’t on duty at the time. The life saver contacted police and stored the suspicious packages in the club room until NSW police arrived.
Founder of the beach clean-up not-for-profit, Emu Parade, Roland Davies, was picking up pollution at Freshwater Beach this morning when a volunteer turned in something unusual.
“A local mum and her son were out collecting rubbish and they just came back with a couple of buckets, which is obviously the usual but she just made a comment that there was something pretty suspicious,” Davies said.
“It was pretty obvious what it was in spite of not having any experience in that world. It was just like, yeah, these three kind of sticky taped up bricks, basically… Like it’s funny and whatever. It’s also like, pretty hectic to be confronted with that first thing in the morning, I don’t want anyone coming in Freshwater with a gun kind of thing.”
Davies called the police who turned up to the scene and seized the items for forensic investigation.
There has been a large swell for the past few days, which may have brought the packages on shore.
It follows the discovery of bricks of cocaine just before Christmas last year at Manly Beach.
Just a fortnight ago, Police confirmed that the brand of the cocaine bricks found locally was “R-Z”. It is not yet known what the current find is called.
However, Davies said the packaging on the bricks he saw at Freshwater had a similar signage on them.
“There were some characters on the front like numbers and letters. I didn’t see how many on each one, they obviously don’t mean anything to me, but no logos or anything like that, some sort of code,” he said.
