Jade Chabela, a 21-year-old beauty queen, was arrested along with the plane’s pilot after a massive 350kg haul of cocaine worth £12 million was found on board after an emergency landing
A beauty queen has been arrested after a whopping £12million worth of cocaine was discovered on her plane when it was forced to make an emergency landing.
Jade Callau, who competes in beauty pageants under the name Jade Chabela, was taken into custody along with the pilot after officers found an astonishing 350 kilos (55 st.) of the class-A drug on board. The pair had reportedly made a botched attempt to escape the scene on foot.
Her identity had been kept a closely-guarded secret since her arrest last Thursday after a federal judge in Argentina’s Entre Rios province placed a secrecy order on the investigation. But today the suspect was unmasked as 21-year-old Callau, who has participated in several beauty contests in Bolivia and made a number of TV appearances as recently as last year.
In 2019 she was crowned Miss Fexpo Borja, a beauty contest in her native town of San Borja in the Beni region, which is around 220 miles from the Bolivian capital La Paz. In August last year, she had appeared on TV in the regional capital Trinidad. She has a large following on Instagram and also has her own TikTok channel with nearly 7,000 followers, where her bio reads: “Here I’m another and there I’m someone.” In one message which she appears to be directed at an ex, she says: “My greatest revenge will be that you see me every day more happy and beautiful.”
Callau and 42-year-old Carlos Costas Diaz, who has been named locally as the Brazilian pilot of the Cessna 210, are said to have been forced to land in a maze of low-lying islands in the east of the Parana Delta called the Ibicuy Islands. After being arrested they were transferred to a prison near Buenos Aires which was reportedly the couple’s scheduled destination before they experienced fuel problems.
Photographs show the massive 359 kilo hail of cocaine seized, which was laid out on the ground near the light aircraft by police. The aircraft had travelled more than 900 miles from Bolivia when it was forced to make the emergency landing in a cornfield.
Nestor Roncaglia, Entre Rios’ Security Minister, said in a statement before the suspect was named: “During the early hours of last Thursday morning, the Entre Ríos police were informed about the landing of a plane in a field in the department of Islas del Ibicuy. A couple were travelling in the plane, who fled and were later arrested. They were a man from Brazil and a woman from Bolivia.
“In view of this event, the federal judge on duty, Dr. Analía Ramponi, was informed. With the cooperation of the National Gendarmerie, the Entre Ríos Police searched the plane and found 352 packages of cocaine with a total weight of 359 kilos. This seizure of illegal drugs is equivalent to more than four million doses of cocaine, which in Argentina is worth approximately $2.2million and in Europe this same quantity of drugs is equivalent to around €14million (£11.75million).”
He added: ‘Everything indicates that the plane came from Bolivia and would have travelled some 1,500 kilometres. The final destination was not Entre Rios, as the forced landing was down to a lack of fuel.”
