Five tonnes of cocaine seized from a container ship brought into Sines
Portuguese police boarded the vessel some 640 nautical miles off Lisbon, escorted it in with the Navy and arrested three people. The operation was codenamed Skydrop and involved British and Spanish forces.
Portugal’s Polícia Judiciária has seized around five tonnes of cocaine from a container ship towed into the port of Sines. Three people were arrested.
The vessel had sailed from a Latin American country and was intercepted a long way out — roughly 640 nautical miles from Lisbon, or 1,185 kilometres. The boarding, as the Polícia Judiciária describes it, happened in extremely difficult conditions on the open sea, with the Navy and the Air Force assisting. The ship was then escorted to Sines, where it docked in the early hours of Tuesday. Searching it took the rest of the day.
Two of those arrested were travelling as stowaways with no legal status. The third is a crew member suspected of being part of the operation. The investigation, codenamed Skydrop, only began in early August.
Who worked on the case
It ran through the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre – Narcotics, the MAOC-N, which is based in Lisbon and pools several European countries’ efforts against seaborne shipments. Britain’s National Crime Agency and Spain’s National Police worked alongside the Portuguese force. That kind of cooperation rarely makes headlines, but it is what explains how anyone works out that one particular container, on one particular ship, in the middle of the Atlantic, is worth stopping for.
Five tonnes is a lot, even by recent standards. It lands four days after two tonnes of cocaine washed up on the beach at Comporta with nobody arrested at all — the mirror image of this one, where the drugs turned up and the owners did not.
The Portuguese Atlantic is a corridor rather than a destination. Sines sits on the path of more or less any route linking South America to northern Europe, and it is the country’s main deep-water port, which makes it the obvious place to take a large ship that needs searching from end to end.
The three men were handed to a judicial authority. The group, police say, specialised in moving large drug consignments into mainland Europe.
Image: Vitor Oliveira / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
