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Portugal’s navy has seized a drug trafficking semi-submersible in the mid-Atlantic, far off the coast of Lisbon.
The Portuguese Navy (Marinha) detected the suspect vessel using its surveillance assets and worked in conjunction with the Judicial Police to plan an intercept. In an example of the significant scale required to mount such an operation, it dispatched a patrol vessel with more than 70 military personnel and sailed a total distance of about 1,500 nautical miles.
Early in the morning of October 29, the team reached the intercept location and boarded the suspect vessel. They found more than 1,700 kilos of cocaine aboard, enough to fetch somewhere in the range of $30 million on the EU wholesale market. The semisubmersible itself – an improvised vessel intended for a one-way journey – was not robust enough to be towed back for investigation, and it sank.
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Sean Hocking
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