A group of Australian police dogs will have to be retrained after it was discovered that they were sniffing out talcum powder rather than cocaine during training exercises, police said on Friday.
An investigation is being carried out into how baby powder was used rather than the illicit drug, Victoria state police assistant police commissioner Paul Evans said.
According to a report in The Australian newspaper, police became aware that something had gone awry when “the dogs ignored bundles of cocaine, but showed unusual prowess in tracking baby powder”.
Federal police supply the cocaine to their Victorian counterparts for the training.
The paper said three investigations have been launched to find out what happened to the cocaine. Evans described the matter as an administrative error.
“We had an issue raised to us late last week where we believed that through our internal audit systems we were missing a small amount of cocaine,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
“But subsequently our early investigations show that it’s an administrative error and that in fact one of the satchels that we did receive did contain talcum powder.”
More forensic testing is under way to see how the bungle occurred, Evans said.
“I’m sure our dogs have got very soft, nice-smelling noses at the moment, but they are in fact trained in detecting talcum powder, so that means that they will have to be retrained in detecting cocaine,” he added. — AFP