At a news conference, the commander of the Lisbon PSP’s Division of Criminal Investigation, Carlos Resende da Silva, said that the two men, aged 33 and 47, were detained in possession of the drugs, which were inside their vehicles. One of the two men, believed to be the buyer of the heroin, is Portuguese and had come into the country by land. The other, believed to be the seller, is a foreign citizen with a European Union passport.
As well as the heroin - enough for some 423,000 individual doses, with a street value of about one million euros - police seized €76,300 in cash, believed to be proceeds from the sale of the drug.
“These detentions were the culmination of an investigation of more than six months and made it possible to make a seizure that counts as the largest ever of heroin” made by the PSP, da Silva said.
The operation, he said, “has reduced drug trafficking” since the quantity seized would have supplied the Greater Lisbon area “for some months”.
The last big heroin seizure in Portugal was in 2012, when the PSP detained five men, also in Greater Lisbon, and seized 28 kilos of the drug.