ELITE officers from the Policia Nacional have seized the largest high-seas cocaine haul in the force’s history after storming a merchant ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
Agents from the GEO special operations unit boarded the vessel 535 kilometres off the coast of the Canary Islands to discover nearly 10 tonnes of the drug hidden beneath a cargo of salt.
The operation, fittingly dubbed ‘White Tide’, resulted in the arrest of all 13 crew members and the seizure of a handgun which was being used to physically guard the illicit shipment.
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Upon searching the hold, officers uncovered 9,994 kilograms of cocaine split into 294 bales, all buried deep within thousands of tonnes of salt.
The merchant ship, which had set sail from Brazil, was intercepted last week while en route to Europe, its final destination unknown.
However, the raid was not without drama. Shortly after the officers secured the vessel, it ran out of fuel and was left drifting in the open ocean for nearly 12 hours.
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Maritime rescue service Sasemar eventually had to tow the boat to the port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where it arrived on Sunday afternoon.
The vessel is currently docked in Tenerife while police carry out further inspections and weighing of the drugs.
Police described the bust as a ‘historic blow’ to international drug trafficking, surpassing the previous record set in 1999 when agents seized 7.5 tonnes of cocaine on the vessel Tammsaare.
To put the scale of the seizure into context, the 10-tonne haul is equivalent to nearly a third of all cocaine seized in Algeciras – Spain’s main drug entry point – during the entire year of 2024 (34.8 tonnes).
The success of the operation was pinned on international collaboration, involving the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Brazilian Federal Police.
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