Cocaine hidden among dead cows. A new transport route to the EU

Drug cartels use ships loaded with sick and dead cattle to smuggle huge amounts of cocaine, which ultimately ends up in Europe, reported the British daily The Telegraph, citing intelligence sources.

Police are not seizing ships because managing thousands of cows would be a “logistical nightmare”. Bad conditions on board and a very unpleasant smell discourage border services from searching ships.

According to sources at the Maritime Narcotics Analysis and Operations Center (MAOC-N) in gang-controlled ports in Brazil and Colombia's Cartagena Up to 10,000 people are loaded onto dilapidated ships at a time. cows. The ships take a route through the Caribbean, picking up cocaine loads (worth approximately £450 million) from smaller ships. The crew hides drugs in grain silos and other hiding places on the ship, sources said.

The ships are officially heading to ports in Lebanon or Egypt, where sanitary regulations regarding farm animals are less stringent than in Europe. Along the way, contraband intended for the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam ends up on pontoons with GPS devices, from where it is picked up and smuggled to Belgium and the Netherlands.

This method is so effective that In the last 18 years, police in Europe have stopped only one ship with cattle transporting cocaine. Meanwhile, according to sources in MAOC-N, at least one suspicious cattle ship leaves South America for Europe every week.

An analyst at the MAOC-N center told The Telegraph that authorities do not want smelly ships to dock in their ports. Additionally, tracking dogs are useless in these cases. Smugglers know this and that is why they choose this method. The cost of searching a ship without intelligence detailing where the drugs were kept on board would be enormous: it would involve bringing the ship into port, removing all the cattle, calling in all the authorities to inspect the very large ship.

On January 24, 2023, Spanish police made the first-ever arrest of a vessel transporting cattle and smuggling cocaine in European waters. Armed officers intercepted the 100-meter Orion V ship 62 nautical miles southwest of the Canary Islands as it was sailing from Colombia to Lebanon. The policemen who discovered 4.5 tons of cocaine hidden in silos were wading through the muck – the daily recalled. (PAP)

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