MADRID, Jan 16 — Spanish police on Thursday said they had busted a network that saw smugglers swim on the high seas to help stash Colombian cocaine on Europe-bound container ships and hijack vessels.

The network employed a so-called “monkeys” technique, which used “youngsters who are good swimmers and from low-income families to load the drug on the vessels that were on the high seas”, police said in a statement.

Other members of the scheme travelled to Spain to “raid the containers by intercepting the ships before their arrival at the Gibraltar Strait”, a busy and narrow body of water separating Europe and North Africa.

Last year, the crew of a ship bound for the southern Spanish port of Cadiz reported stowaways on the deck, with 1.3 tonnes of cocaine found in a container, police said.

Shortly afterwards, another ship passing through Portuguese waters raised the alarm about “the hijacking of the vessel” by armed stowaways who unloaded cocaine concealed in a container.

The investigation discovered that the network retrieved the drug by throwing it overboard merchant vessels to smaller, faster boats close to Europe, “subduing the ships’ crew and extracting the drug from the containers using military techniques and weapons of war”.

The cocaine was then stored in southern Spain before its transportation by road to other European countries.

The authorities made 30 arrests and seized 2.4 tonnes (5,291 pounds) of cocaine, military-grade weapons, ladders used to raid the ships, luxury vehicles and cash.

Spain’s close ties with Latin America and proximity to Morocco, a top cannabis producer, make it a key entry point for drugs into Europe.

On Monday, Spanish police announced their largest-ever seizure of cocaine at sea after impounding a Europe-bound container ship in the Atlantic Ocean carrying almost 10 tonnes of the drug. — AFP