Spain busts cocaine ring that used offshore floating bases

MADRID, Jan 26 (Reuters) - ⁠Spanish police ⁠have ‍broken up a vast cocaine trafficking operation that used speed boats to bring the ‍drug onshore from floating bases in the Atlantic, ​seizing 10 metric tons of the drug and arresting ​105 suspects. Police said on Monday that a year-long investigation in cooperation with law enforcement in countries including Cape Verde, Colombia, France, ​Portugal and the U.S. showed the group brought an estimated 57 tons of cocaine to ​Europe in the period. Speed boats -- operating at night from rivers in ‌southern Spain, the northwestern Galicia region and the Canary Islands, as well as from ​Portugal and Morocco -- navigated far ⁠into the Atlantic to offload drugs from transport and storage ships. "They managed to ‌create genuine aquatic platforms where pilots would remain at sea for over a month at a time, carrying ‌out several successive operations", while other members used sophisticated equipment to ‌monitor security agencies' communications and movements, a police statement said. Officers seized 30 boats, 70 vehicles and numerous pieces ‍of high-tech communications and surveillance equipment. The investigation also showed that at one ⁠point the group paid as much as 12 million euros to the family of a deceased crew member in order to buy their silence.

(Reporting by Andrei Khalip, Editing by William Maclean)

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