Spanish police nab sailboat and cocaine cargo

Spanish police have seized 600 kilos (1,320 pounds) of cocaine on a sailboat in the Atlantic bound for Spain in a drugs operation that netted seven suspects, including three Europeans, police said Saturday.

The cocaine had been transferred to the British-registered sailboat off the coast of the island of Antigua in the Antilles, a police statement said.

Police, who had been following the sailboat since last month, intercepted it between the Portuguese islands of the Azores and Madeira and found on board 600 packets each containing a kilo of cocaine.

Three European crew members from France, Italy and Spain were arrested in the operation. Four others from Colombia, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, picked up by police in Madrid, are suspected of being responsible for the drugs network, police said.

Anti-narcotics officials believe Portugal and Spain have become the main points of entry into Europe for cocaine coming from Latin America.

In related news, a man claiming to be a Catholic priest was arrested Friday at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport after he was caught carrying 3.5 kilograms of cocaine under his robes, a spokesman for Dutch border police said.

Narco-submarines used for shipping tons of cocaine

On September 11, 2000, reports began to circulate regarding super-sized narco-submarine construction efforts underway in Bogota, Colombia, raising many incredulous eyebrows in the process. "They won't believe me in Washington," said Leo Arreguin, the surprised DEA director in Colombia, on stumbling upon the most spectacular findings of his career as an anti-narcotics agent. Arreguin had discovered a submarine 36 meters (118 feet) long and capable of transporting up to 15 tons of cocaine. "Never in my 32 years of police work have I seen something like this." According to police, the project was the result of efforts by Russian and Colombian mafias with ties to organized crime in the United States. Upon seeing the submarine, one Russian embassy official exclaimed, "This is technology from my country!"

Since 1994, traffickers have used mini-submarines to transport drugs, but Ismael Idrobo from the Colombian Naval Academy pointed out that never before had such a large vessel been discovered. Built in Bogota, the narco-submarine was to be dismantled into three sections and transported to Buenaventura, a seaside port located over 700 kilometers away. The vessel, weighing in at 150 tons, could have operated at depths of 100 meters (330 feet) and able to carry 10-15 tons of cargo while remaining submerged for over six hours at a time.

In 2003, the Spanish customs agency (SVA) reported that it suspected that mafias hailing from the northwest Spanish province of Galicia possessed submarines for carrying out their narcotics trafficking operations. At that time, the agency explained that Russian submarines had been up for sale and that narcotraffickers from various countries potentially could use them to evade counter-narcotics patrols. Then in 2006, Spanish police discovered a 10-meter long submarine near the Cies islands, close to the port city of Vigo. Not surprising, Vigo is an industrial city known for its long tradition of building submarines.

Since 2005, Colombia's navy has captured 18 homemade submarines. In November 2007, Colombian marines seized a makeshift submarine capable of smuggling up to 12 metric tons of cocaine through the Pacific to Central America. The vessel, under construction but nearly completed, was found in a rural area in south Nariño province and had enough space for four crew members. That same month, the Costa Rican Coast Guard announced that U.S. Coast Guards had seized a submarine carrying 3.5 tons of cocaine in the Pacific Ocean off Costa Rica and arrested three Colombians on board. In December, Colombian forces, backed by the U.S. Coast Guard, stopped an underwater craft that was then sunk by its crew members in order to destroy their incriminating cargo. Since then, another submarine was discovered on January 4. In both cases, the smugglers opened the hatches to sink the vessels before they could be boarded by authorities. Each of these submarines had the capacity to ship 10 to 12 tons of cocaine to the United States.

In 2008, look for more discoveries of these narco-submarines off the coast of Guinea-Bissau, the worlds' fifth poorest country and an increasingly important transit hub for Colombian narcotics smuggled to Europe.