More than a ton of cocaine, worth several tens of millions of euros, was seized on Friday aboard a hijacked boat, AFP learned on Tuesday from a source close to the investigation and from a police source. , confirming information from La Voix du Nord.
The twenty crew members of various nationalities (Russians, Ukrainians, Filipinos and Ethiopians), including the Romanian captain, were arrested, said the source close to the investigation.
They were de-ironed in the morning in Paris at the end of their custody, said the police source.
The national court in charge of the fight against organized crime (Junalco) was seized.
A large-scale seizure
According to the Voix du Nord, the national customs intelligence department was interested in a cargo ship transiting the strait between Calais and Dunkirk, suspecting it of carrying cocaine to the port of Antwerp.
The drugs were hidden in the hold of the ship, the
Trudy
, a Liberian-flagged ore carrier that left Brazil to deliver bulk.
Some 1,127 kg of drugs in total were seized, the police source said.
Read also Customs: in the port of Le Havre, suspicious cargoes combed through
By the end of August, more than 400 kg of cocaine had been discovered by customs at Dunkirk in a container from Colombia.
Even more recently, more than 700 kg of cocaine were seized from a truck attacked by criminals in Le Havre.
This Friday's seizure is all the more impressive: by way of comparison, 12.2 tonnes of cocaine were discovered in France in 2018, against 8.8 tonnes in 2019.
