The Portuguese police made a record seizure of almost nine tons of cocaine, after intercepting a “submarine narco” off the Azores, carrying what is believed to be the largest haul of drugs ever discovered aboard a semi-submersible vessel bound for Europe.
The narco-submarine was intercepted off the Azores PHOTO Shutterstock
The Portuguese Judicial Police (PJ) announced that the drugs were seized in a recent joint operation, carried out together with the Portuguese navy and air force, in coordination with the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA), reports The Guardian.
The intercepted vessel later sank, taking 35 bales of cocaine with it to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The four men on board – three Colombians and one Venezuelan – were arrested.
“The vessel, which came from Latin America and was operated by four foreign nationals, was carrying 300 bales of cocaine”stated PJ in a statement. “The interception of the semi-submersible vehicle took place at sea approximately 230 nautical miles from the Azores in extremely difficult and dangerous conditions due to adverse weather.”
A police spokesman told Agence France-Presse that the operation resulted in “the biggest cocaine seizure ever made in Portugal”.
According to Portuguese media, the seized drugs could be worth up to €600m (£521m).
In March last year, Portuguese police located and intercepted another narco-submarine off the Azores, which was carrying almost 6.5 tons of cocaine to Europe.
Although semi-submersibles have been in frequent use in Colombia and other parts of South and Central America since the 1980s, they were not detected in European waters until 2006, when an abandoned submarine was found in an estuary in the Galicia region of northwestern Spain.
The first fully loaded narco-submarine discovered in European waters was recovered from a Galician bay in 2019 after it had been deliberately sunk along with the three tonnes of cocaine it was carrying.
