Spanish police sink drug smugglers’ plans, seize homemade submarine
MADRID: Spanish police announced on Friday that they seized a homemade narco-submarine able to carry up to 2 metric tons (2.2 tons) of cargo.
Police came across the 9-metre-long craft last month while it was being built in Málaga, on southern Spain’s Costa del Sol, during a broader international drug operation involving five other countries and the European Union’s crime agency, the Europol.
The 3-metre-wide semi-submersible craft is made of fibreglass and plywood panels attached to a structural frame, has three portholes on one side and is painted light blue. It has two 200-horsepower engines operated from the inside.
Rafael Perez, head of the Spanish police, said the vessel had never sailed.
“We think it was going to go into the high seas to meet a mother ship (to) take on board the drugs,” probably cocaine, before returning to Spain, Perez told reporters.
“It is like an iceberg,” he said of the vessel’s structure. “In practice, nearly all of it goes under water apart from the top, which is the only part of it that would be seen from another ship or a helicopter.”
Similar drug-smuggling vessels have in the past been discovered in the Atlantic Ocean, especially off Central and South America. They sit low in the water to escape detection and rarely are able to fully submerge.
The wider police operation against the alleged international smuggling ring netted hundreds of kilos of cocaine, hashish and marijuana in various places in Spain, with 52 people arrested.
Chile bust nets drugs with Escobar’s likeness
SANTIAGO: Chilean authorities on Friday said they had confiscated more than three tonnes of cocaine and marijuana wrapped in white paper stamped with the image of deceased Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.
The Escobar-decorated packages were a first in Chile, authorities said, though similar shipments were confiscated by police along the Mosquito coast of Honduras earlier this year.
“Criminal organizations always put a stamp on (their product), something distinctive, for traceability, to ensure that large shipments reach their destination,” said Hector Espinosa, director general of Chile’s PDI investigative police.
Escobar, Colombia’s bestknown drug lord and the head of the Medellin cartel, was killed in a police operation in 1993.