A suspected drug trafficker died overnight from Wednesday to Thursday in southern Spain after a boat collision with Civil Guard agents engaged in an anti-drug surveillance operation, according to the latter.
According to a spokesperson for the Civil Guard, the collision took place around midnight at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, a town located near the Andalusian city of Cádiz. Three people were on board the boat when it hit the Civil Guard boat. In the shock, two agents were slightly injured, victims of “contusions”, this source told AFP.
The three traffickers then left to take refuge on a bank of the Guadalquivir, where one of them, seriously injured, “was abandoned” by his companions, who fled. Arriving on the shore, the civil guards tried to revive the victim, before transporting him to Sanlúcar de Barrameda. This man, whose age was not specified, finally died at one in the morning.
According to the spokesperson for the Civil Guard, the victim’s accomplices took advantage of the absence of the agents, busy treating their companion, to return to the scene of the tragedy and set fire to their boat.
The collision took place very close to the site where another accident occurred on September 1, in which a drug trafficker was killed after a chase with the Civil Guard. That day, the drug traffickers’ boat accelerated for 400 meters before crashing “at full power” on the bank of the river, where around a hundred bales of hashish were found.
Spain is one of the main entry points for drugs into Europe, particularly the region of Andalusia (south), due to its proximity to Morocco where cannabis resin is produced. The Bay of Cadiz itself is the regular scene of drug seizures. At the beginning of February, two civil guards died there after a collision in the middle of the night between their boat and a drug trafficker’s boat in the port of Barbate. The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, then described the facts as “an assassination” and promised “zero impunity” against drug trafficking in the region.
