New Zealand finds cocaine hidden in diamond-studded horse head from Mexico

The New Zealand Police found the drug-stash of a lifetime when they discovered that Mexican and American smugglers used a blinged horse's head to import a record amount of coke into the country.

The statue, which was transported from Mexico in May, contained 35 one-kilo bricks of cocaine, all of them stacked in the base of the horse's neck.

The stack, worth NZ$14 million (more than US$10 million), is the biggest haul ever in New Zealand, where about 250 kilos a year is usually impounded.

“This is obviously an extremely large amount of cocaine and in the past we've only found very small amounts of this drug,” told Detective Senior Sergeant Colin Parmenter.

A Mexican and an American were arrested in Auckland over the weekend as they were getting ready to fly to Hawaii, while another Mexican was detained in Christchurch.

Importing cocaine is punishable by a life sentence in New Zealand.

So far, there are no reactions from the Mexican authorities or diplomats in the country.