Related with video Coast Guard says drug sub held $180M worth of cocaine.An FBI dive team recovered nearly 7.5 tons of cocaine in a semi-submersible craft which had sunk off the coast of Honduras near the Nicaraguan border.
MIAMI -- The crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Mohawk, a medium-endurance cutter homeported in Key West, Fla., interdicted a drug smuggling, self-propelled semi-submersible (SPSS) vessel, commonly referred to as a drug sub, in the western Caribbean Sea Sept. 17.
Used regularly to transport illegal narcotics in the Eastern Pacific, this interdiction is only the second Coast Guard interdiction of an SPSS in the Caribbean. The Coast Guard’s first interdiction of a drug smuggling, SPSS vessel in the Western Caribbean Sea happened July 13.
The crew of a Coast Guard C-130 Hercules airplane spotted a suspicious vessel and notified the Mohawk crew of the location. The Hercules is designed for long range law enforcement patrols to allow identification and tracking of suspect vessels as well as search and rescue missions.
With the assistance of the Hercules crew, a Mohawk-based Coast Guard helicopter crew and pursuit boatcrew interdicted the SPSS and detained its crew. The SPSS sank during the interdiction, but not before a quantity of cocaine was recovered.
Built in the jungles and remote areas of South America, the typical SPSS is less than 100 feet in length, with four to five crewmembers, and carries up to 10 metric tons of illicit cargo for distances up to 5,000 miles. Drug traffickers design SPSS vessels to be difficult to spot and to rapidly sink when they detect law enforcement thereby making contraband recovery difficult... read more
