Hit to drug trafficking. The ship with the drugs and the five detainees will arrive at the port of Las Palmas on March 5. The drug could have a value of more than 250 million euros on the market.

27 February 2009. Yesterday, February 26, the Tax Agency arrested the five Venezuelan crew members of a fishing boat that was sailing about 800 nautical miles from the Canary Islands with 5,000 kilos of cocaine.

The seizure of the 'Doña Fortuna', a vessel approximately 16 metres in length and Venezuelan flagged, took place on Wednesday when officials of the Tax Agency in the patrol ship 'Sentinel' boarded the ship based in Puerto de la Cruz (Venezuela) and, after surprising the crew members, found more than 180 bales of cocaine between 25 and 30 kilos each. The drug could have a street value of more than 250 million euros.

The boarding happened without incident at 05:57 on the 26th some 780 miles northwest of Las Palmas. It is the first time that this type of vessel has been used to transport cocaine in the phase near European coasts.

Operation 'Jirito' was run under the direction of Court number 2 of Ribeira and in coordination of the Counternarcotics Prosecutor of La Coruña. The ship, together with the drugs and the arrested people, are expected to arrive on 5 March at the port of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. This significant operation is linked to another being developed by the National Police and which is still ongoing.

Coinciding with operation 'Jirito', and assuming that the destination of the drug could be the Galician-Portuguese coast and that therefore some fast boat could leave from Galicia to receive the goods transported by the “Doña Fortuna”, the Customs Surveillance of the Tax Agency organised a special air-maritime and land surveillance operation on the Galician coast on the 24th, 25th and 26th. As a result, at dawn on February 26 in the Ría de Muros/Noya, it was possible to intercept a glider-type boat with four powerful outboard engines and loaded with petrol that was preparing to go out to sea. Proceedings were instructed in the Court of Instruction number 1 of Muros at the same time that the investigation work aimed at identifying the crew members or organisation that could have planned to use this boat intensified.

Operation "Jirito" is the seventh operational success of a special working group set up in Galicia in 2005 by the Customs Surveillance service of the Tax Agency, with the support of maritime and air resources and the collaboration of international organisations, aimed at detecting mother ships that use the islands route (Cape Verde? Canary Islands ? Azores) to transport cocaine from South America to Europe. As a result of the work of this unit, six ships have been intercepted and nearly 19 tonnes of cocaine have been prevented from reaching Europe in four years.

Among these operations, the most prominent are: In October 2005, the "ROQUE NUBLO" was boarded, which had 4.271 tonnes of cocaine in its stores; in June 2008, the fishing vessel "SAN MIGUEL" with 4.08 tonnes. and now the "DOÑA FORTUNA" with a load of five tonnes, all of them Venezuelan flagged.

The loss of more than nineteen tons of cocaine is a severe blow to drug trafficking organisations with losses of approximately 1.2 billion euros and confirms the operational importance of the investigative work carried out by Customs Surveillance.