MADRID: Spanish police announced on Saturday the seizure of 4.5 tons of cocaine aboard a Togolese-flagged cargo ship from Latin America which was intercepted off the Canary Islands.
The “Orion V,” which had been trailed from Colombia and transports cattle from Latin America to the Middle East, had been under surveillance for over two years and had previously been “checked and searched, but no drugs could be found inside, despite the presence of sufficient clues,” police said.
A joint naval and air operation finally made the breakthrough in locating the cocaine, which has an estimated street value of 105 million euros ($114 million), on Tuesday, hidden in a container used to feed the cattle.
The ship had stopped at ports in about a dozen countries before Tuesday’s raid, and police said drug smugglers had started using livestock ships because it was more difficult for police to trace their illicit cargo.
“International organizations are reinventing themselves to transport drugs from Latin America to Europe, using livestock to make the control and localization more difficult,” the Spanish police statement said.
The operation mobilized among others the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Maritime Analysis and Operations Center for narcotics (MAOC-N), the Togolese authorities and the Spanish police.
The 28 crew members from nine countries were arrested.
Officers unloaded dozens of boxes containing the cocaine on the port side in Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria.
The “Orion V” was similar to another Togolese-flagged vessel, the “Blume,” which was intercepted in mid-January in the same area south-east of the Canary Islands, on which the same amount of cocaine was found.
A total of nine tons of drugs have been seized in January, police said in a statement.
Spain’s proximity to North Africa, a key source of hashish, and its close ties with former colonies in Latin America, the world’s main cocaine-producing region, have made it a gateway into Europe for drugs.
(With AFP and Reuters)
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