Colombia's navy seizes a ship sailing to Belize with 130lbs of cocaine.
The boat, named "Shilo" and flying a U.S. flag, was detained in the Caribbean ocean between Cartagena and Belize. On board were two men, one an 80-year-old U.S. citizen, and the other a middle-aged Colombian.
Both men were subsequently taken with their vessel to the Cartagena Coast Guard station where the Technical Investigation Team (CTI) of the Prosecutor General's Office tested the substance carried by the men and verified that it was cocaine.
Caribbean Coast Guard Commander Carlos Serrano stated, "We saw the boat on the high seas, followed it and later boarded and inspected the ship. That was in the early morning on Sunday," reports El Espectador.
Serrano added that "the 59 kilos (130lbs) of cocaine were in various plastic bags and had a market value of approximately $1.5 million."
In respect to the US citizen, Serrano said that "upon being captured he said he was simply en route from Cartagena to Belize. He is a life-long navigator. But this drug does not just appear overnight in a boat. Or maybe, as the detained men stated, the drug came out of nowhere."
A boat laden with over a million dollars worth of cocaine and headed to Belize, was intercepted by the Colombian navy and seized along with its two occupants. An American Octogenarian along with a middle-aged Colombian travelling in a U.S. flagged boat, were busted in Caribbean waters by the Colombian Navy last Sunday, for possession of more than a hundred pounds of cocaine.
According to Colombian Coast Guard officials, their navy boarded and conducted a search of the boat and found 130 pounds of cocaine packaged in various plastic bags. Both men were subsequently detained and their vessel named Shilo was seized by Colombia's Coast Guard.
When captured, the unidentified 80 year old U.S. citizen told officials that "he was enroute from Cartagena (Colombia) to Belize". Both men have denied knowledge of the drugs. The cocaine is estimated to have a market value of approximately $1.5 million dollars. The two men remain in the custody of Colombian authorities.
The biggest drug bust in local history was recorded in mid-November 2010 when an executive aircraft stuffed to the gills with eighty bales of Colombian cocaine landed along the Southern Highway near Bladen Reserve. Since that sizeable haul reports of international drug activity within our borders have been far and few. That doesn't not mean that Belize is no longer being used as a conduit for the shipment of drugs to North America. Since the beginning of the week, there have been two busts of cocaine shipments destined for Belize. On Tuesday, four men, one confirmed to be an American national, were captured onboard a U.S. flagged vessel at a boatyard in Cartagena, Colombia. Inside the yacht, Linda Melody, were eight hundred and eleven kilograms of cocaine, the equivalent of one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight pounds, parceled off in a number of individual bricks bound for Belize. The seizure is estimated at a street value of twenty million US dollars. The joint sting operation conducted by the Colombian Coast Guard and the Marine Corps came on the heels of another raid last Sunday which netted a cache of fifty-nine kilograms or a hundred and thirty pounds of cocaine valued at a million and a half US dollars. If you do the math, the value of both shipments are valued at forty-three million dollars in Belize Currency.
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A boat laden with over a million dollars worth of cocaine and headed to Belize, was intercepted by the Colombian navy and seized along with its two occupants. An American Octogenarian along with a middle-aged Colombian travelling in a U.S. flagged boat, were busted in Caribbean waters by the Colombian Navy last Sunday, for possession of more than a hundred pounds of cocaine.
