MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentine police dismissed for claiming mice gobbled half a ton of missing maijuana

Media reported that police in Pilar, impounded 6,000 kilograms of marijuana. But when police inspected the evidence warehouse later, 540 kilograms were missing.

Eight police officers in Argentina, including a former town police commissioner, have been dismissed from their posts after four of them claimed that more than half a ton of missing marijuana was carried off by mice, Buenos Aires media reported on Wednesday.

The media reported that police in the town of Pilar, about 35 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, impounded 6,000 kilograms of marijuana. But when police inspected the evidence warehouse sometime later, they found that 540 kilograms were missing.

During their investigation, officers found that former police commissioner Javier Specia had not signed the inventory for the pot before he left his post in April 2017. Specia and three of his subordinates were called before a judge, and all of them told the same story: the missing marijuana had been “eaten by mice.”

That explanation didn't fly with forensics experts, who testified that mice wouldn't have mistaken marijuana for food -- and if they had done so, “a lot of corpses would have been found in the warehouse,” a spokesperson for Judge Adrián González Charvay said.

Specia and three of his officers must testify before the judge next month to help determine whether the weed vanished, in the spokesperson's words, “by connivance of negligence.”