Replying to Drug Tunnel found over US/Canada Border

this thing is crazzzzzzzzzy

A tunnel longer than a football field built to ship drugs under the U.S. border was shut down by law-enforcement officials yesterday.

A source close to the investigation said the tunnel was being used to smuggle marijuana between Aldergrove and Lynden, Wash.

"This thing was under surveillance for the last eight or nine months," said the source.

Both American and Canadian law-enforcement agencies were watching the tunnel, the source added.

Five people were caught "in the act" of drug smuggling and investigators aren't ruling out the possibility the tunnel was built by organized crime groups. "It's not something the average drug dealer on the street would be involved in," he said.

The source noted the tunnel could also have been used to smuggle guns into Canada, though he said there was no evidence of that.

Officials sealed it just after it opened.

Built with timber walls and ceilings and lined with a cement floor, the tunnel is about 150 metres long, said the source.

On the Canadian side, the tunnel's depth in the ground is about four metres. It climbs to a depth of about one metre on the U.S. side, said the source.

Separated by a ditch and a road, it ran from a private residence on the U.S. side to a quonset hut on the Canadian one in the 26700-block Zero Avenue, he added.

The source spoke on the condition of anonymity because the news hadn't been made public yesterday. He noted the investigation was being handled by the FBI and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

FBI spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs told Associated Press yesterday that "another federal agency" was doing the investigation.

Paula Shore, spokeswoman for Canada Custom's border services, didn't want to comment last night.

Julie Luke and her family have lived next door to the property for 22 years. While she's seen police chases and border patrols, she's never seen anything like this.

"I'm just shocked. No one lives in the house, but a man came over and introduced himself once."

Luke said the man, who called himself "Francis" and was in his 20s, bought the house about two years ago. She described him as "nice" and "very polite" and said he mowed the lawn regularly.

RCMP worked late into the night at the property and a number of vehicles were parked around the quonset hut.

Situated in a parking lot between rows of deserted greenhouses, the hut's windows were covered from the inside with a blue tarp.

Just across the border, the house that was connected to the tunnel sat vacant with two U.S. Border Patrol SUVs parked out front.

Luke said she never suspected anything illegal but often wondered why the house on the U.S. side was vacant. "It's a nice house. I thought that it was strange that there was no one living there for so long."

Officials were expected to release more info at a news conference this morning.

Cracking down on the cross-border pot trade, which is estimated to be worth over nine billion dollars Cdn a year, is a growing problem for U.S. border officials.

In fact, Forbes magazine called marijuana Canada's most important agricultural export.


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