By Belize Live News Staff: The plan seemed simple enough: carry the big black bag into the bushes, tuck it behind the roots of a fallen tree, cover it with dried palm leaves, and walk out empty handed. The problem for whoever did it in August Pine Ridge on Saturday morning is that the walk was being reported to Special Branch in real time.
The Belize Police Department reports that intelligence reached Special Branch at 10:32 a.m. on Saturday, July 25, 2026, describing a man in the Orange Walk District village hiding a large black plastic bag in a bushy area before leaving without it.
Forty minutes later, police were combing those bushes. The stash gave itself up quickly, a black garbage bag wedged behind dried tree roots under a blanket of palm leaves, and inside it, a leafy substance suspected to be cannabis.
The station scale delivered the headline number: five packages weighing a combined 11.5 pounds, or 5.22 kilograms, of suspected cannabis. The packaging told its own story, three rectangular parcels wrapped in transparent tape, a vacuum-sealed square, and a tied green plastic bag, the tidy handiwork of product meant to move, not to sit.
Nobody was around when police arrived, so nobody wears handcuffs, yet. The suspected drugs were sealed, labelled, and logged for the exhibit keeper, and the investigation continues.
Somewhere in the north, someone returned to a fallen tree and found only palm leaves and disturbed earth. More than five kilos, gone in under an hour, to a tip they never saw coming. The bushes, it turns out, have eyes.
Anyone with information can reach the Orange Walk police or Crime Stoppers anonymously at 922.
