The Supreme Court has confirmed the prison sentences of the sailors and crew who, ten years ago, used the ship Juan Sebastián Elcano to traffic cocaine between Colombia, the United States and Spain. The military judges, as elDiario.es has learned from judicial sources, have rejected the appeals of two of the defendants and declared final the sentence that imposed sentences, many of them in accordance, of between one and three years in prison to three sailors, two corporals and the ship’s cook. A decade later, the investigation has not been able to capture in a judicial resolution how the 130 kilos of cocaine and heroin that were finally found in the ship’s guts arrived on the ship.
The judges thus put an end to the drug seizure that in the summer of 2014 affected the flagship of the Spanish Navy: the sailboat that serves as a school for new recruits to the maritime division of the Armed Forces and that, in addition, It decks itself out and welcomes thousands of visitors every time it arrives in port. One of his last mass visits was in Barcelona this past September.
At the judicial level, the case began when the United States secret services informed the Spanish authorities in 2014 that several detainees in New York with 27 kilos of cocaine had stated that the drug had left a Spanish military sailboat, delivered by several of its crew. in exchange for money. As time went by, another operation against drug trafficking on the banks of the Hudson revealed that another 10 kilos of heroin also came from the Spanish ship. Security cameras had captured several Spanish sailors in different areas of the city, supporting the version of the detainees.
The investigation found up to 130 kilos of drugs in the depths of the ship and, through the tapped mobile phones, managed to draw a broader network of suspects: a cook who was in contact with the Colombian drug dealers and the sailors and corporals. that they had agreed to carry cocaine and heroin from Cartagena de Indias to Manhattan.
By the time the case came to trial before a military court, most of the culprits, accused of trafficking barely 10% of the seized cache, had chosen to agree with the Prosecutor’s Office on sentences that would involve acknowledging their guilt but not necessarily going to prison. . The cook who put the sailors in contact with the traffickers was sentenced to two years in prison. The sailors and corporals who agreed were sentenced to two years in prison for drug trafficking.
The Supreme Court endorses the sentences
Two of them wanted to fight their innocence at trial and were sentenced to three years in prison and their appeals, as elDiario.es has learned, have been rejected by the fifth chamber of the Supreme Court. Regarding possible irregularities in the custody of the drugs and the rest of the evidence, the Supreme Court aligns itself with the Prosecutor’s Office to affirm that “not any irregularity or incident invalidates the chain of custody.”
Military judges also reject allegations of alleged irregularities in the tapping of the defendants’ phones. “There is not the slightest hint that the phone analyzed by the North American police was different from the one that was tapped,” they explain. “Under no circumstances does it allow us to infer the existence of manipulation,” they add before rejecting the rest of the reasons and validating the ruling of the military court of first instance: “We are faced with elements of judgment that have been fully evaluated, in a correct, logical and complete manner, conclusion that is easy to obtain in view of the tenor of the questioned Judgment.”
The final sentence in the case comes ten years and a few months after the outbreak of the case with most of the accused acknowledging the facts but without the investigation being able to discover who brought most of the cocaine on the ship that was later found during the records. Now it will be the courts that execute the resolution and decide whether some of those convicted have to go to prison, although many of them have already spent time imprisoned preventively and, in addition, do not have to pay fines of hundreds of thousands of euros. that are traditionally associated with drug trafficking crimes. Because in the case of Juan Sebastián Elcano, the investigators never recorded the market value of the drugs that were confiscated.
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