Drug cartels use ships packed with disease-ridden dying cattle to smuggle huge quantities of cocaine to Europe
International drugs syndicates are smuggling vast quantities cocaine to Europe on ships packed with disease-ridden dying cows, it has emerged.
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Animals are being left festering on board ships and police are failing to tackle the problem because they are put off by the foul conditions on board.
They face having to search through months of faeces and the carcasses of dead animals to try and locate the hidden drugs on board.
They also say it is a ‘logistical nightmare’ to conduct searches of vessels with thousands of sick cattle on board. Some ships can carry up to 10,000 cows at a time.
Sources at the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre, Narcotics (MAOC-N), based in Lisbon, told the Telegraph that packages of drugs are often hidden in the ship’s giant on board grain silos when the boats are loaded up in Colombia.
The vessels are most often bound for the ports of Beirut in Lebanon or Damietta in Egypt, where sanitation regulations for livestock are less stringent.
At some point on their Atlantic crossing, the crew retrieve the drugs and tie them to inflatables with GPS trackers and throw them overboard, where they are picked up by fast boats and smuggled to Belgium and the Netherlands.
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The method is so effective that in the past 18 years, European police have seized only one livestock vessel carrying cocaine.
A source said: “You would not want to spend more than one minute on one of these vessels, you can only imagine the smell. The authorities don’t want to have these vessels at their ports.
“You can imagine the cost of such an operation, to get to a port, take all the cattle out, get all the authorities in to do an inspection on a vessel that is very big, a lot of concealment [for drugs]. They [the gangs] are very professional and they know exactly what they can take advantage of.”
Sniffer dogs are near useless at detecting the drugs on board because they are so put off by the cows and their stench, they added.
Two years ago Spanish police made the first ever seizure of a cattle ship carrying cocaine in European waters.
Armed police intercepted the 100m long Orion V 62 nautical miles south-west of the Canary Islands and found 4,500kg of cocaine, with a value of around £82m, hidden in packages in cattle food silos.