The Colombian Navy caught the largest cocaine submarine ever built by a cartel and recovered 102 bundles of its rich cargo. The unlawful ship was the length of several military submarines.
The country’s navy confirmed the operation on Friday. The navy stated in a statement that its ships detected the submarine on radar in the Pacific Ocean and summoned Colombian Air Force aircraft to track its route.
Despite the bad weather, a naval force intercepted the ship and arrested three people on board. According to the navy, the arrests saved the crew’s lives because the submarine was sinking owing to a leak in its engine room.
The marines found 102 bags of cocaine totaling little more than three tonnes. The sinking sub was scuttled after many attempts to refloat it in order to avoid disrupting shipping in the region.
The submarine was 30 metres long and three metres broad, making it the largest narco-submarine discovered since the first one was discovered in 1993. These vessels, designed and manufactured by drug cartels, are technically semi-submersibles because they travel barely below the water’s surface to evade detection.
The dimensions of the submarine are comparable to those of an Iranian Ghadir-class assault submarine.
The Colombian Navy has intercepted 228 narco-subs in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans over the last three decades. So far this year, four have been apprehended.
The three-ton haul from the sub is far from the largest single cocaine bust by Colombian officials. In 2017, police investigators storming a farm near Medellin confiscated 13.4 tonnes of the opioid, a number that has yet to be matched in the six years afterwards. The largest seizure in US history occurred in 2019, when about 20 tonnes of cocaine worth more than a billion dollars was discovered on a cargo ship near Delaware Bay.
