Nearly four tonnes of cocaine were seized off the coast of the Canaries by French customs, supported by Spanish agents.
An illustration of their new “shield strategy”.
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In the images which open the video above, provided exclusively to TF1 by French customs, the customs plane has just spotted its target: a 70-meter cargo ship flying the Tanzanian flag, approximately 300 kilometers off the coast of Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands. Then appeared the semi-rigid French and Spanish agents. The sea is rough, the waves form troughs of 4 meters. Customs officers must board as quickly as possible. “What is important is to move quickly, to have the effect of surprise and deterrenceexplains Joël Pigeon, commander of the patrol boat Jean-François Deniau. There are several fears in fact: the fear of a response, but also of being scuttled by fire or water.“.
The smallest nooks and crannies of the cargo are then inspected. In a technical room closed with a padlock, customs officers discovered 150 bales of cocaine, or 3 tons and 200 kilos. Estimated resale value: 208 million euros. The six members of the crew, Turks and Azerbaijanis, were arrested and brought back to Spain.
“It’s quite far from our usual seas of work”
A week earlier, it was in a fishing boat that agents found 589 kilos of cocaine. These seizures, described as “exceptional“in a press release from the Ministry of Budget and Public Accounts, were carried out as part of joint operations carried out for a month by French and Spanish customs officers off the coast of the Canaries.”It’s quite far from our usual seas of work“, underlines Ronan Boillot, national director of the customs coast guard, in the TF1 video. It is, he continues, “fight against drug trafficking as close as possible to transit areas, as close as possible to drug routes“. Operations which illustrate the new “shield strategy” of customs: intervening before the narcotics arrive on the national territory.
Cocaine from South America sometimes takes circuitous routes. To cover their tracks, traffickers do not hesitate to make a stopover in West Africa. Before going back to Europe, they then pass near the Canary Islands, as shown in the infographic above. In 2023, French customs intelligence enabled the seizure of 40 tonnes of cocaine by foreign services. A drop of water in the ocean.
