Four Guyanese and two Albanians were on Thursday arrested in Spain after they were found on a Guyanese registered boat containing one tonne or 1,000 kilos of cocaine.
“The operation was carried out in collaboration with the American agency DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and the Spanish Navy. The six crew members of the vessel were arrested…,” a release from the Tax Agency of Spain stated.
The arrests comes even as Irish authorities reported on a seizure of a vessel in Cork containing some 2.2 tonnes or 2253 kilos of cocaine that it said fetches a street value of €157M, which had come to Guyana from Curaçao on August 18th before crossing the Atlantic.
“A further three men have been arrested as part of an investigation into a cargo ship which was impounded off the coast of Cork this week and found to contain a large quantity of cocaine… the bulk cargo ship used to smuggle 2.2 tonnes of cocaine,” the head of the Irish Joint Task Force which conducted the operation told a press briefing.
Reports from Spain’s Tax Agency are that the fishing vessel ‘Mathieu’ was spotted without a flag in the Atlantic some 1,100 kilometres off Cape Verde, a country comprising a group of islands that lie 385 miles off the west coast of Africa.
According to the Spanish Tax Agency, its Customs Surveillance Service in a joint operation with the National Police and the Portuguese Jewish Police, intercepted the vessel with its cocaine cargo. Then a patrol boat – Fulmar – towed it to a port in the capital city of Arrecife on the Spanish island of Lanzarote, where it was unloaded.
When Stabroek News made contact with Head of the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit (CANU) James Singh, he said the agency was aware of the situation and an investigation had been launched.
According to the release, the bust was as a result of the existing international channels for the fight against drug trafficking, through which information was received from the US agency. The information alerted to the existence of an international criminal organisation that would seek to carry out the transfer of a large amount of cocaine from one vessel to another in the sea.
“The information available to the researchers coincided with the information held by the Investigation Units against the Narco-trafficking of the Portuguese Jewish Police, and a joint operation was established to exact location of the transport of cocaine. With the alert received, the fast interception of the vessel was designed as the most effective scenario to prevent the drugs from deviating in a diversified way to Spain,” the release indicated.
It disclosed that after receiving the information the National Police coordinated with Customs Surveillance of the Tax Agency to find the point where the vessel was located. The interception was finally carried out by the Fulmar in the Atlantic, 600 miles from Cape Verde. It was then that authorities here were contacted and asked to confirm the registration of the vessel as being from here and they did.
“From here, the authorities of Guyana were asked to confirm the registration of this vessel in their country and to authorise its transfer to the nearest Spanish port,” the release disclosed.
When the vessel was searched, the agents found 40 bundles of the pellets that are normally used for the transfer of the cocaine hydrochloride on the stern cover. The six crew members were arrested and were transferred on board the Fulmar.
While they were unloading the boat, 40 large bales of cocaine were discovered hidden under the deck. In total, the cocaine weighed 1,000 kilos.
Ireland
In the case in Ireland, the BBC reported that two men had last week appeared in court in connection with the seizure of a large amount of cocaine off Cork, the southern coast of the Republic of Ireland.
The drugs, which Gardaí (Irish police) said have an estimated street value of €150m, were taken from a bulk cargo ship off County Cork on Wednesday.
“In court were Jamie Harbron, 31, with an address of South Avenue, Billingham, Stockton-on-Tees, England and 60-year-old Vitaliy Lapa of no fixed abode, but originally from Ukraine. The pair appeared at a special sitting of Waterford District Court on Friday evening.
Gardaí said the seizure was the largest in the history of the Irish state. Both men are charged with conspiracy to import drugs,” the BBC reported.
Neither made any reply when charged. They were remanded in custody to appear before Wexford District Court, via video link, sometime today.
The BBC said that the two men were arrested after being “winched to safety from a trawler off the Wexford coast after the vessel ran aground on a sandbank on Sunday night.”
It also related that their appearance in court arose from “an ongoing major investigation into illegal drug smuggling, focusing this week on the activities of the MV Matthew cargo ship.”
The Panamanian-registered bulk carrier, which left South America last month, was intercepted and escorted to port in Cork on Tuesday by an Irish joint task force which included Gardaí, the naval service, army rangers and revenue and customs staff.
The BBC said that five other men also arrested in connection with the operation remain in custody.
Busts
Over the years there have been several busts overseas with Guyanese connections. In December 2021, a container with rum which originated from Guyana was discovered in the Netherlands to also contain 1,100 lbs of cocaine, but CANU had said that checks before departure had revealed no contraband items.
Then in 2021 law enforcement authorities in Jamaica unearthed over 100 packages with more than 300 pounds of cocaine in containers from Guyana at the Kingston Freeport Terminal Limited (KFTL).
That marked the third international drug bust in months linked to Guyana.
In November 2020, law enforcement officials in Belgium announced that they were probing the discovery of 11.5 tonnes of cocaine in a container of scrap metal shipped from Guyana. The shipment, which was described as “the largest overseas drug bust ever, worldwide,” was seized on its arrival at the Port of Antwerp. It carried an estimated street value of €900 million. The Brussels Times had reported counter-narcotics prosecutors as saying that they tracked the transatlantic journey of the cocaine from Guyana.
Authorities had issued an arrest warrant for Marlon Primo, said to be the shipper, but he has never been arrested. The Guyana Revenue Authority subsequently dismissed some scanning staff who reportedly were operating the scanner at the time the container left Guyana.
On August 22, 2020 authorities in Hamburg, Germany announced that they were probing the discovery of 1.5 tonnes of cocaine in a container of rice from Guyana.
According to a Deutsche Welle report, the seizure was made after investigators at the Joint Customs and Police Investigation Group (JIT) received a tip-off about drug smuggling.
The cocaine, which had an estimated street value of around €300 million (US$353 million) was hidden between sacks of rice in the container, the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper said.
There was no arrest on the local front in relation to this bust.
