Gardaí investigating the discovery of over €20 million worth of cocaine by Revenue officers aboard a bulk carrier in Co Limerick hope that the examination of mobile phones and other communications equipment on the ship may help establish the destination of the drugs.
Customs officers boarded the MV Verila on Tuesday morning, shortly after she docked at Foynes Port on the Shannon Estuary around 10am. With the assistance of sniffer dogs, they found an estimated 300kg of cocaine worth an estimated €21 million.
Customs officers and gardaí were remaining tight-lipped about the operation, but it’s understood that the drugs were found in six separate large packs in a storage area above deck on the 190m long bulk carrier, rather than in the cargo holds of the ship which was carrying grain.
The Garda assisted customs officers throughout Wednesday in the search of the vessel, and seized a number of mobile and satellite phones as well as the ship’s log, manifest and charts. This, gardaí hope, will assist them in trying to determine the ultimate destination for the drugs.
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The six large packs of drugs, each believed to contain around 50kg of cocaine worth €3.5 million, contained GPS trackers as well as buoyancy devices, leading to the belief that the drugs were destined for drops at sea rather than for importation into Foynes or some other port.
“Drug smugglers often drop off consignment of drugs from the mother ship with these GPS locators attached – they can drop them off 40 or 50km offshore and then other gang members can come up in smaller vessels and use the GPS tracker to find and collect them,” said a Garda source.
It is unclear whether the drug gang behind this latest seizure had already dropped off other bales of drugs before they put into Foynes, but gardaí are hoping an examination of navigation equipment and charts seized from the ship may reveal where the ship was prior to entering the Shannon Estuary.
The MV Verila is owned by a company called Verila Navigation Limited, based in Valetta in Malta. The ship is also registered in Malta and she is managed by a Bulgarian shipping company called Navigation Maritime Bulgare, which is headquartered in Varna and manages a fleet of 70 ships.
The ship, which was built in 2022 at the Jiangsu Yangzijian shipyard in China, is currently valued at $24 million and appears to have spent the last few months on a triangular route, journeying between Europe and South America and North America before returning to Europe.
Gardai are liasing with the Maritime Analysis Operations Centre, Narcotics (MAOC – N), based in Lisbon, Portugal, to try and establish where the MV Verila may have picked up the drugs and delivered any consignments.
The most recent records show that MV Verila left Santos in southern Brazil on November 4th and headed for Quebec in Canada, arriving there on November 23rd, before continuing on to Hamilton on Lake Ontario where she arrived on November 27th before departing on November 30th.
The ship then returned to Hamilton on December 5th and spent two and a half days in port there before departing again on December 8th and taking some 11 days to cross the Atlantic before arriving at the Shannon Estuary and docking at Foynes on Tuesday morning.
She has been subjected to six standard inspections, including one by the Russian authorities in the Black Sea last February, one by the US Coastguard at Tampa in Florida last July and one the Canadian authorities at Hamilton last August. No deficiencies were found during any of the inspections.
The ship has a crew of 18 aboard, and gardaí have already begun holding interviews with them individually and separately to find out what they knew about the consignment of drugs. Some of the voluntary interviews have taken place on the board the ship and some at Garda stations in Limerick.
Meanwhile, the MV Verila remains under tight garda security at Foynes, where members of the Armed Support Unit have established a cordon around the vessel. It is being detained under Customs legislation while the deep search of the vessel continues.
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