LOS ANGELES - More than 200 bags of cocaine were found in the stomach and intestines of a Japanese man who died last week on a flight from Mexico to Japan, Mexican officials said Monday.
An autopsy revealed that the 42-year-old man had swallowed 246 bags. The man died Friday from cardiac arrest caused by a drug overdose, the law enforcement officials said.
The man took a flight from the Colombian capital of Bogota to Mexico City, where he boarded a flight to Narita International Airport.
He started having a convulsive seizure and showed other symptoms of an overdose soon after taking off from the Mexican capital, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing in the early hours of Friday at an airport in Hermosillo, the state capital of Sonora, Mexico. The man was declared dead soon after.
Prosecutors identified the man as Udo N, while the local paper El Sol de Mexico reported the man’s name as Satoshi Udo.
Carrying cocaine aboard passenger planes by swallowing small bags of the drug is a common smuggling tactic, and there have been many cases of smugglers dying from cocaine bags rupturing inside their bodies.
The plastic bags were approximately 2.5 centimeters long and 1 cm wide, the officials said.
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