A submarine carrying 6.5 tons of cocaine has been captured in one of the biggest drug busts of its kind.
The vessel had been heading towards Europe from Brazil when it was intercepted by Portuguese police in an operation involving the British Crime Agency earlier this week.
The smugglers were busted during their attempted crossing of the Atlantic, with police finding £530million of cocaine onboard.
Five alleged members of a criminal organisation were travelling aboard the vessel – three Brazilian men, one Colombian and a Spaniard.
All five crew members were arrested and transferred to the Portuguese island of Sao Miguel.
The arrests mark the first time a drug-smuggling semi-submersible has been intercepted in the open sea, Spanish authorities claimed.
The vessel is thought to be one of the largest ever built with the purpose of transporting drugs between continents.
‘The traffickers planned to collect the drugs near the coast using high-speed vessels and smuggle them ashore,’ a statement by Spain’s Guardia Civil read.
‘The transatlantic movement of semi-submersibles is increasingly frequent, with several cases in recent years.
‘These types of vessels are difficult to detect and often carry a large amount of cocaine… the crew can easily sink them if caught, making it more difficult to recover the drugs as evidence of the crime.’
Luis Neves, a Portuguese chief, said the operation had ‘dealt a hard blow to a very powerful organisation.’
Criminal drug trafficking operations are increasingly using semi-submersibles – which are submarines that only partly submerge beneath the water surface – to transport narcotics overseas.
Police first intercepted a narco-submarine in 2019 when a vessel carrying 3.3 tons of cocaine was discovered off the coast of Spain. After being built in a Brazilian jungle, the vessel had headed across the Atlantic from Colombia, South America.
Since then, both Spanish and British police have stopped a number of ‘narco-subs’ from transporting drugs intercontinentally.
In September 2024, Royal Navy commandos stormed their first semi-submersible drug smuggling submarine during a patrol in the Caribbean.
A boarding team made up of Royal Marines from 47 Commando, specialist sailors and US Coast Guard personnel, clambered aboard a submarine off the coast of the Dominican Republic which they found to be carrying £160million of cocaine.
And in a significant smuggling bust in December of last year, three narco-submarines trafficking $12billion worth of drugs from South America to were intercepted by the Colombian navy.
1,400 tons of drugs were seized during an operation involving the security agencies of the United States, Brazil, Spain, the Netherlands and a number of other operations.
More than 400 people were also arrested during the crackdown.