ARCHIVED - Narcos sink boat carrying three tonnes of cocaine off Galician coastline

The crew attempted to prevent the police seizing the drugs by sinking their own boat

Nine Georgian and Turkish crew members were fished out of the sea by police officers, who managed to extract the haul, worth an estimated 150 million euros, before the ship went under.

Galician drug traffickers lost millions this week in the first large-scale police operation of the year off the northern region’s coastline, which led to the seizing of three tonnes of high purity cocaine and nine arrests.

The raid was a result of joint police investigations that began in May last year when a highly active drug trafficking organisation was detected in the Rías Baixas area. After months of investigations, coordinated by the National High Court, officers suspected that a merchant ship would soon be arriving carrying a large amount of cocaine, which would be transferred to other boats somewhere off the Ría de Arousa coast.

All the signs pointed to the ‘Nehir’, a 52-metre-long freighter flying under the Republic of Palau flag, which had a navigation route that coincided with the type of vessel police had anticipated would be used.

However, as the vessel moved into position the weather intervened, storms along the Atlantic coast making it impossible for smaller boats to meet it offshore and collect the drugs as had been planned.
With their target immobile and literally a “sitting duck” the decision was made to act and the Spanish Navy patrol boat ‘Serviola’ was sent to intercept the freighter, along with a Guardia Civil Maritime patrol boat from Gijón, a helicopter and three Customs patrol boats from A Coruña, Ribadeo and Santander.

National Police Special Operations (GEO) officers boarded the ‘Nehir’ in a surprise assault in the early hours of Monday morning (22 February) and searches revealed bails of cocaine stashed inside. Finding themselves cornered with no way to escape, the crew quickly decided to flood the compartments and sink the ship in an attempt to destroy all the evidence.

Although the entire vessel had sunk within just two hours, police officers’ quick work meant they were able to remove much of the cocaine and also rescue all nine crew members from the water. The cocaine seized, was of high purity, and the total amount rescued weighed approximately three tonnes once it was unloaded in the port of Ferrol on Tuesday morning, with a value of an estimated 150 million euros (30,000 a kilo is the standard price).

Operation Bocanegra continues, and although the premature intervention has made immediate further arrests on the ground more difficult, as the smugglers were not caught in the act of bringing the drugs ashore, the Pontevedra anti-drug police unit hopes to make further arrests as the investigation into the receiving organisation that would have distributed the cocaine in Spain and Central Europe develops.

Galicia is probably the biggest entry point in Spain for cocaine and the profile of smuggler controlling this area of the country has changed in the last few years, from local mafias, to highly organized international gangs as the entry point grows in importance.

In 2019 the volume of the drug hauls seized increased by 827%, and in 2020 ten tonnes of cocaine was seized.

It has been estimated that only 10% of shipments are intercepted by drug enforcement in transit and some of the biggest cocaine seizures found in Spain have been made in Galicia, the narcos even using submarines to bring in thousands of kilos in a single load.

However, this latest haul is one of the largest in the last ten years.