BREST: The French navy has seized 10.7 tons of cocaine with a street value of hundreds of millions of dollars from a Brazilian fishing boat in the Gulf of Guinea, officials said Wednesday.
The operation off the west African coast last Thursday targeted a Brazilian-flagged boat measuring around twenty meters (66 feet).
French authorities requested the raid based on a tip-off from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), France’s Atlantic maritime prefecture said.
The 10,693 kilogrammes of cocaine seized had an “estimated market value of nearly 695 million euros” ($754 million), the prefecture added.
The Brest public prosecutor’s office, which holds jurisdiction over such cases, ordered the destruction of the drugs but decided not to prosecute the crew.
The French navy stations one to two ships supported by a maritime patrol aircraft in the Gulf of Guinea as part of a longstanding securit operation.
French navy seizes 10.7 tons of cocaine off African coast
https://arab.news/mcujw
French navy seizes 10.7 tons of cocaine off African coast
- French authorities requested the raid based on a tip-off from the US Drug Enforcement Administration
Indonesia nursing home fire kills 16: official
JAKARTA: A fire at a nursing home on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi killed more than a dozen people, with three others injured, a local official said Monday.
Firefighters received the report of the blaze at 8:31 p.m. Sunday at a nursing home in the North Sulawesi provincial capital Manado, said the city’s fire and rescue agency chief Jimmy Rotinsulu.
“There were 16 deaths; three (people) had burn injuries,” he told AFP.
Many bodies of the victims were found inside their rooms, Jimmy said, adding that many of the elderly residents were likely resting in their rooms in the evening when the fire broke out.
Authorities managed to evacuate 12 people — all unhurt — and transfer them to a local hospital, he said.
Footage aired by local broadcaster Metro TV showed the fire engulfing the nursing home, while locals helped to evacuate an elderly person.
Deadly fires are not uncommon in Indonesia, a Southeast Asian archipelago of more than 17,000 islands.
A fire tore through a seven-story office building in Indonesia’s capital Jakarta this month, killing at least 22 people.
In 2023, at least 12 people were killed in the country’s east after an explosion at a nickel-processing plant.
