It was six o'clock in the afternoon last Saturday when the twenty bathers who were sunbathing on Melicena beach, in the municipality of Sorvilán (Granada, about 92 kilometers from the capital), were surprised by the noise of a patrol boat of the Civil Guard that was chasing a small boat a few meters from the coast.
The astonishment did not stop there.
The launch headed straight for shore, and was about to run over a vacationer.
"That one is coming here. They are going to disembark here, you will see, you will see ”, commented one of the bathers while recording the scene. "These" were two drug traffickers and the boat a narcolancha full of bundles of hashish. The two crew members jumped out of the boat, each with a bag in their arms, and began to run aimlessly.
The amazement of the bathers dissipated almost at the same time that the boat ran aground in the middle of the umbrellas.
A dozen of them pounced on one of the boat's occupants until they managed to retain him in the sand.
The other was captured minutes later by the Civil Guard.
The vacationers had become unexpected
bowhunters
in swimming
trunks
, although one of them, the one who first
tackled
the alleged criminal, was an off-duty Armed Institute sergeant.
The two drug traffickers, aged 32 and 43, were transferred to the Civil Guard cells in Salobreña, 40 kilometers from the place where they were arrested.
The load of drugs that they failed to save, 808 kilos of hashish, would have cost more than one and a half million euros in the market.
So far this summer, the largest stash of marijuana in Spain - 5.6 tons of buds ready to be transported to the United Kingdom - was developed in La Mojonera, a municipality near the Almeria coast, between Roquetas del Mar and El Ejido . The operation took place on July 15 and the dismantled gang had its operations center on the Costa del Sol, the usual scene of this type of operation, not only in summer. In this part of the province of Malaga, the last large cache, at the end of July, had as its protagonist not a narcolancha, but a modern sailing ship in whose hull 1,018 packages of one kilogram of cocaine hydrochloride were hidden. In addition to boats, in this territory a drone dedicated to transporting drugs between Morocco and Malaga was also confiscated in the middle of last month.
At the end of July, the Civil Guard dismantled in Algeciras (Cádiz) an organization dedicated to laundering drug money. This has been one of the most relevant anti-drug operations this summer in the province of Cadiz. On the other side of the Guadalquivir valley, Huelva has taken center stage in recent months. On June 27, agents of the Armed Institute seized 3,700 kilos of hashish hidden in narcolanchas in Ayamonte. On July 30, agents of the same body, in collaboration with the Tax Agency, the Judicial Police of Portugal and Europol, dismantled a criminal organization that intended to introduce 15 tons of hashish into Spain through the port of Huelva.