SPAIN’S Guardia Civil breached the security cordon of a British nuclear submarine arriving at Gibraltar on Thursday as military activity in the Strait heats up.
The Guardia Civil patrol vessel approached HMS Anson at speed as it was being escorted into harbour on Thursday, coming within metres of the security perimeter maintained by Gibraltar Defence Police interceptors.
Footage posted online was described by one Gibraltar-based naval observer as ‘reckless, unprofessional, dangerous’.
The move comes as the Spanish navy runs its biggest annual war games in the same waters across the Gulf of Cadiz, the Strait of Gibraltar and the Alboran Sea until May 22.
More than 2,000 personnel are deployed, including the aircraft carrier Juan Carlos I, three frigates and a submarine.
This year’s exercise includes, for the first time, live electronic warfare drills incorporating GPS jamming.
The confrontation stands in contrast to the arrival four days earlier of a US Navy Ohio-class submarine — capable of carrying up to 24 nuclear missiles — which called at Gibraltar on May 10 without any reported interference.
HMS Anson is one of the Royal Navy’s most powerful submarines, carrying Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of over 1,600km and Spearfish torpedoes.
The 7,800-tonne vessel has just completed one of the most significant deployments in recent Royal Navy history.
It left its home base in Scotland in January, stopped at Gibraltar to load weapons – a move the Ministry of Defence publicly confirmed in a rare move widely seen as deliberate signalling – before sailing 8,000 nautical miles to Australia under the AUKUS defence partnership.
It then deployed to the Arabian Sea during the US-Iran conflict before heading back to Gibraltar.
Spain does not recognise British sovereignty over Gibraltar’s territorial waters, and the Guardia Civil has repeatedly been accused of provocative behaviour in the area.
The Olive Press has contacted the Ministry of Defence and Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment.
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