The National Police has confirmed the cache that was transporting the cattle transport ship intercepted in the waters of the Canary Islands: 4.5 tons of cocaine. The investigation of the ship, which was guarded in the outer docks of the Port of Las Palmas since Thursday, was under summary secrecy until today, when the police force has completed the count and seizure of the drug. It is a Togolese-flagged freighter, coming from Latin America, and which was scheduled to make a stopover in Ceuta on its way to the Middle East. Specifically, she left the port of Cartagena de Indias on January 2. The ‘Orion V’, which transported cattle, had been under surveillance for more than two years, and had already been “controlled and searched, but no drugs had been found inside”, despite the presence of “indications”, has Police explained. An air-naval device finally made it possible on Tuesday, January 24, to find the cocaine, hidden in a feed silo that was supposedly used to feed cattle. The operation, which mobilized the United States anti-drug agency DEA, the Maritime Intelligence Analysis Operational Center for Narcotics (MAOC-N), the Togolese authorities and the Spanish police, allowed the 28 crew members to be detained, of nine nationalities. The ship ‘Orion V’ has the same dimensions as another Togolese cargo ship, the ‘Blume’, intercepted in mid-January in the same area, some 100 kilometers southeast of the Canary Islands, and in which the same amount of cocaine was found. . In January, a total of nine tons of drugs were seized, according to the police statement. Spain’s close ties to South America, where cocaine comes from, make it one of the main gateways for the drug into Europe.
