Spanish authorities, with support from the US DEA, seized more than 4,500 kilos of cocaine on a cargo ship at sea from Colombia and arrested its 28 crew members, several of them Latin Americans, after discovering the drug in a cattle shipment.
The Spanish Police reported this Saturday of this operation in which ten Tanzanians, five Syrians, four Kenyans, two Ecuadorians, two Panamanians, two Colombians, a Dominican, a Nepali and a Nicaraguan were arrested.
“International organizations reinvent themselves when it comes to transporting drugs from Latin America to Europe, using live cattle to make it difficult to control and locate them,” he said in a statement.
The Togolese-flagged cargo ship Orion V was boarded in the Atlantic some 62 miles, about one hundred kilometers, southwest of the Spanish Canary Islands by a vessel from the Spanish Customs Surveillance Service, in collaboration with the United States agency United Against Drugs (DEA), the Togolese authorities and the European Maritime Analysis and Operations Center on Drug Trafficking.
The merchant was investigated since 2020 and had been previously inspected without finding drugs, on suspicion that he was loading it in port or on the high seas hidden in cattle that he transported mainly to countries in Africa and Asia, according to the Police.
A device by sea and air managed to locate it this week and in a feed silo inside it, bundles with the drug were found, for which the merchant was transferred to the Spanish port of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in an operation coordinated by the Prosecutor’s Office Anti-drug of the National Court of Spain.
In mid-January, the Spanish authorities boarded another cargo ship with similar characteristics, also with some 4,500 kilos of cocaine on the so-called Atlantic Route of this drug from South America to Europe, the statement stressed. EFE