British police have helped to capture a submarine carrying 6.5 tonnes of cocaine to Europe, in one of the biggest drug busts of its kind.
The vessel had departed from Brazil when it was captured by Portuguese police in the Atlantic Ocean, 500 nautical miles south of the Azores islands.
Five crew members from Brazil, Colombia and Spain were arrested and transferred to the Portuguese island of Sao Miguel.
Officials said the submarine contained £530 million worth of cocaine, while a Portuguese newspaper said it was one of the largest semi-submersibles ever built to transport the drug from South America to Europe.
“The traffickers planned to collect the drugs near the coast using high-speed vessels and smuggle them ashore,” read a statement by Spain’s Guardia Civil.
Several tonnes of cocaine were seized on a submarine in the Atlantic – Pen News
Spanish authorities, which tipped off the Portuguese, said it was the first time a drug-running semi-submersible had been intercepted in the open sea.
“The transatlantic movement of semi-submersibles is increasingly frequent, with several cases in recent years,” Spain’s Guardia Civil said. “These types of vessels are difficult to detect and often carry a large amount of cocaine… the crew can easily sink them if caught, making it more difficult to recover the drugs as evidence of the crime.”
Europe is the biggest cocaine market after the US, with hundreds of homemade submarines launched to the continent since the practice took off two decades ago.
In 2019, the discovery of a submarine carrying 3.3 tonnes of cocaine off the coast of Spain was described by police as the first “narco-submarine” to be intercepted in Europe.
The latest bust, dubbed operation Nautilus, also involved the Portuguese air force, the UK’s National Crime Agency, the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the Lisbon-based Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre, of which Britain is a part.
Luís Neves, a Portuguese police chief, said the operation had “dealt a hard blow to a very powerful organisation”.
