Customs, backed by the Navy, announced Saturday seizure of 7.4 tons of cannabis on a fast boat, Thursday during an operation in the Mediterranean Sea, a hundred kilometers from the Algerian coast.
A boat spotted by plane
The operation allowed the arrest of three traffickers who were on board. They were driven, along with their boat and drugs, to Toulon, where they were handed over to justice on Saturday. The three men were placed in police custody. The drug, packaged in some 230 packages, represents an estimated 52 million euros for resale. The investigators were Saturday sealing up the drug parcels.
On Thursday morning, a Customs surveillance aircraft spotted the suspicious craft, a dark blue, hard-to-detect, blue boat that cruised in international waters. Thanks to his cameras, the plane followed the boat at high altitude, out of sight of the traffickers, to prevent them from scuttling or setting their boats on fire. Two patrol boats from the French Navy and Customs went to the scene, and in the afternoon, the assault was given by a team of 12 soldiers and 8 customs officers on board fast pneumatic channels.
"They were not armed"
Traffickers, holders of Turkish passports, spontaneously admitted to carrying drugs in their boat, apparently an old race boat. "They were unarmed and did not resist," said Max Ballarin, director of customs coast guard services in the Mediterranean, at a press conference. "This seizure reflects the importance of cannabis trafficking", which "floods the European market" and especially the cities of Marseilles, said the prosecutor of the Republic of Marseille, Xavier Tarabeux, at this press point at the naval base in Toulon .
Its public prosecutor's office and its specialized judges of the JIRS (specialized interregional jurisdiction) were responsible for the investigation, initially opened in Toulon. According to the investigators, the boat, with 14,000 liters of fuel in the tanks, was probably on an axis that goes from the production areas in Morocco to areas of chaos in Libya, so-called "rebound" zones that allow then to re-export it to Europe.