Atlantic raid nets record cocaine haul
<a href=www.thescotsman.co.uk>thescotsman.co.uk Sat 10 May 2003
GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN THE drug smugglers were 4,500 miles into their voyage across the Atlantic from Colombia, making good progress at a speed of 20 knots , when it became clear that their plan had gone horribly wrong.
Packed into every available space on their high-speed vessel, a former German motor torpedo boat dating from the Second World War, was 3.6 tonnes of cocaine. On the streets of mainland Europe and the UK, it would have been worth £250 million, more than enough to compensate for the discomforts of the trip.
But instead of a clear run to the Spanish coast, a mere 420 miles away, they found their way blocked by the Royal Navy frigate HMS Cumberland and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary supply ship Wave Knight.
As they looked closer, they could make out the small rigid inflatables, launched by the British ships, bouncing across the waves towards them. Getting closer by the second, each one was packed with heavily armed boarding parties. Above the waves, two Lynx helicopters, which had taken off from the decks of the ships, were swooping towards them.
They quickly realised that the situation was hopeless. Switching off their engine, they waited for the boarding parties to arrive. They did not have to wait long.
Within moments, the helicopters were overhead, ropes dropping on to the deck of the 140ft-long craft and armed men swarming down them. Then the inflatables were alongside, and more men poured on to the boat .
Among them were British and Spanish customs officers, who had helped to co-ordinate the carefully-planned operation. As one naval source observed later, while they couldn’t comment on how they knew the boat would be where it was, they would have had to be very lucky simply to stumble across such a small boat in such a large ocean.
What the boarding party found was the largest cocaine haul ever recovered in European waters. Its seizure brought to £1.5 billion the running total of drugs seized by the Royal Navy in the last five years.
The smugglers’ boat, the ‘Cork’, had collected the drugs in Colombia, hoping to deliver them to the European mainland, where about one fifth of the cargo was destined for the UK. There was so much cocaine on board that some of the crew were sleeping on the bridge because their bunks were so full. They were only 16 hours from their destination when the navy swooped.
The commanding officer of the Cumberland, Captain Mike Mansergh, was understandably delighted with the success of Thursday’s operation.
"Both ships - and we had two naval helicopters with us - managed to converge on the vessel and, to its great surprise, we were suddenly there in the middle of the Atlantic, so they stopped very quickly," he said.
"This enabled us to put Spanish customs officers on board the boat. They were certainly quite surprised and there was no resistance."
He added: "It was an enormous haul and we are delighted we have managed to stop that amount of cocaine entering the streets of Europe."
For the Cumberland, however, such an operation was hardly something new. It had only just returned from operational duties in the Gulf, where it had carried out more than 100 similar boardings of vessels suspected of breaking UN embargoes on trade with Iraq.
The captain of the Honduras-registered Cork is from the Dominican Republic and the crew members are Greek, Customs said. All eight men aboard the high-speed boat were arrested by Spanish customs officers.
The Cumberland was yesterday escorting the smugglers’ vessel to Spain, where they would be able to establish precisely how much cocaine had been seized.
NAVAL VICTORIES FIGHTING DRUGS
THE largest seizure of drugs by the Royal Navy was in 1999, when armed sailors from HMS Marlborough recovered cocaine worth £1 billion in two operations four days apart.
Four tonnes of cocaine was recovered from the Panamanian-registered freighter MV China Breeze in the Caribbean and another four tonnes were found on the Panamanian freighter MV Castor. Later the same year, the Royal Navy recovered two tonnes of cocaine valued at £135 million from the Panama-registered cargo ship MV Adriatik in an operation in the Caribbean, north of Venezuela.
Last year, the Royal Navy frigate HMS Grafton seized 750 kg of cocaine worth an estimated £100 million from a fishing boat in the Caribbean after a tip off from the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
Yesterday’s seizure was the second-largest by Spanish Customs. In July 1999, 7.6 tonnes of cocaine was seized aboard a freighter.