When they were discovered on the high seas, 280 nautical miles from Cádiz and 150 from Cape San Vicente, the four crew members of the narco-submarine let the water enter the boat to sink it and tried to get to safety by climbing to the surface of the boat. The very dangerous maneuver took place this Tuesday shortly before three in the afternoon in Atlantic waters when the agents on board the ship Furmal, of the Customs Surveillance Service, were about to board it. The occupants of the semi-submersible, all of them Colombian nationals, were rescued moments after it sank around 3:35 p.m. and, immediately afterwards, they were arrested. The narco-submarine and its cargo were lost and, given the depth of the sea area in which it sank, they are irrecoverable, according to several sources familiar with the operation.
Investigators believe that the boat – known in police jargon as “low profile vessels” (LPV) since it never fully submerges because part of it is always on the surface – had a cache on board. of cocaine that its crew members were supposed to transfer at a point not far from where it was intercepted by speedboats so that they could unload it somewhere on the Cádiz coast. It was a 20-meter-long narco-submarine, similar to those already intervened in the Aldán estuary in 2019 and in the Arosa estuary in 2023, capable of transporting up to four tons of drugs. In the last five years, five of these vessels have been seized in Spain. In the middle of this month, another similar one was sighted about 100 nautical miles north of Luarca when it was heading, already empty, back to South America and which could not finally be intercepted. Since 1993, more than 300 vessels of this type have been seized on both sides of the Atlantic.
“The sinking was very fast,” police sources explain about the operation, in which the National Police, Civil Guard and Customs Surveillance coordinated through the Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime (CITCO). “The boarding operation became a rescue operation,” add sources familiar with the operation. The Customs Surveillance ship was placed next to the boat in the lee to prevent the existing rough seas from putting the lives of the four crew members at risk, as seen in the video distributed this Wednesday by the Ministry of the Interior. During the intervention, neither the effects on board the vessel nor the mobile phones of the crew members that could have provided any type of information about the recipients of the cargo or the origin of the cargo could be recovered. Researchers are not considering the possibility of refloating due to the technical difficulty and high cost.
🚩Intercepted in the waters of #Atlantic a #semisubmersible that was heading towards the peninsular coast
🚔All 4 crew members arrested
🚔According to researchers, the ship has characteristics similar to those of other “narco-vessels”
➡️900 kg of… pic.twitter.com/BbXraTLxlR
— National Police (@policia) June 26, 2024
The location of the boat was not coincidental. According to sources familiar with the investigation, it was the DEA that, through international collaboration channels, was providing the Spanish authorities with the position of the semi-submersible for approximately two weeks, which made it possible to follow its trajectory and intercept it when it approached the area that was supposed to be the cargo transfer point. Crossings of this type of boat from South America can last more than three weeks.
The sunken drug submarine had “identical” characteristics to the vessels detected in recent years, according to police sources. At 20 meters in length, it has a fiber structure of a color very similar to water, which makes it very difficult to detect when it is sailing, unless you are close to it. It also had a hatch on the top, side and front windows, a vent and an engine in the stern. The people who travel in them ―”possibly members of a Colombian cartel,” say sources close to the investigation― are usually a guarantor of the organization that owns the drugs.
What affects the most is what happens closest. So you don’t miss anything, subscribe.
Subscribe
The operation in which the narco-submarine was intercepted also occurred shortly after the ship Fulmar of Customs Surveillance will participate in another joint operation with the National Police and the Civil Guard in waters north of the island of La Palma. “We had news that a boat, possibly a fishing boat that we have not been able to locate, was going to transship its cargo in Canarian waters to a drug boat to take it to land,” say sources familiar with the intervention. The information turned out to be correct, and during the patrol of the area a boat was detected at dawn last Saturday that, upon being discovered, fled while bales of drugs were being thrown into the sea.
This drug boat could not be intercepted due to the rough seas and the high speed reached by this type of prohibited boat – the next day an abandoned one appeared on the beach of Tazacorte, in La Palma, which investigators suspect is the same one – but the Customs Surveillance vessel was able to recover 30 bales with nearly 900 kilos that had been thrown overboard. The chase lasted six hours, as reported by the National Police and Civil Guard. All these facts have been brought to the attention of the Anti-Drug Prosecutor’s Office of the National Court, which has referred the proceedings to the court on duty to continue the investigations, take statements from the crew of the semi-submersible and try to identify those from the La Palma drug boat. .
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#crew #members #narcosubmarine #sink #intercepted #high #seas