"Narco sub" sinks with drugs on board after record amount of cocaine seized from vessel off the Azores
Portuguese authorities on Monday said they had seized a record haul of cocaine from a semi-submersible craft intercepted off the Azores archipelago before the vessel sank in the open seas.
The nearly 9-ton cargo of drugs is "the biggest seizure of cocaine ever in Portugal," a police spokeswoman told the Agence France-Presse news agency.
Police said officers intercepted the so-called "narco sub" in recent days some 230 nautical miles from the islands in the Atlantic Ocean.
They were assisted by the navy and air force, as well as the U.K. and U.S. authorities, in difficult weather conditions.
The submersible eventually sank with 35 of the 300 packages of drugs it was carrying, the police said.
Police released a short video on social media showing officers carrying out the operation at sea and suspects being handcuffed.
It originated in Latin America and had three Colombians and a Venezuelan on board, it added.
Last March, police said officers had confiscated nearly 6.5 tons of cocaine from a semi-submersible vessel off the Azores while bound for the Iberian peninsula. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the British National Crime Agency and the Spanish Guardia Civil also assisted in that bust, authorities said at the time.
Narco subs, which cannot go fully underwater, are popular among international drug traffickers as they can sometimes elude detection by law enforcement.
Manned semisubmersibles built in clandestine jungle shipyards have been used for decades to ferry cocaine north from Colombia, the world's biggest cocaine producer, to Central America or Mexico.
But in recent years, they have been sailing much farther afield, crossing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
The journey can be deadly. In 2023, a narco sub with two dead bodies and nearly 3 tons of cocaine aboard was seized off the coast of Colombia.