Six men have been arrested in Bleiswijk while they were unloading 7.7 tonnes of cocaine out of a lorry.

The cocaine had been found by customs officials at Antwerp port, hidden in a consignment of bananas and tracked by a joint Dutch Belgian task force to the town, just north of Rotterdam.

Three of the men arrested were Dutch, two Belgian, and one, who was driving the lorry, is Polish. They were aged between 28 and 60.

The drugs have a value of some €200 million police said. More arrests have not been ruled out.

Belgian media also report that seven Dutch nationals were arrested near Antwerp on Tuesday in a high-security police operation. That too is thought to be in connection with a drugs shipment.

According to some reports, the men were heavily armed and may have been planning to try to recover a cocaine shipment which had been seized earlier by the authorities.