Costa News Spain Breaking News | English News in Spain.
Drug gangs AUDACIOUS ambushed police officers to retrieve a high speed vessel abandoned along the Andalucian coastline.
The attack happened early in the week on a country road near Moguer, Huelva.
Guardia Civil patrols responding to an alert that the tractor pulling a narco-boat had overturned were ambushed when they tried to intervene by masked men who hurled rocks at them.
The officers had to immediately call for backup. This allowed the smugglers escape and avoid arrest.
READ MORE The police rumble as narcos load up on fuel at a popular beach in Marbella, loved by tourists and expats alike
Storm Claudia exposed this new level in impunity, as it battered along the coast of western Andalucia and forced the narcos on the coast to seek refuge.
It was an amazing display of numbers as the seas were covered with speedboats like a cloud.
At least eight narco-vessels were seen during the storm off the Huelva coast, many of which had been abandoned by crews and washed up in popular locations.
Some smugglers tried to recover high-value items, including an attempted smash-and grab theft of a boat that was stranded on the Espigon Beach.
The sight came only days after Spain’s Chief Anti-Drug Prosecutor, Ana Rosa Morán, warned that the Atlantic is ‘scandalously full of narco boats, and also narco-submarines’.
READ MORE After an officer was shot by a military assault rifle, Spain’s top police force demands that it be sent to Andalucia narco-hotspots.
She said that the oversupply in cocaine fuels fierce competition between heavily armed international groups, and could turn Spain into a battleground for drugs similar to the Netherlands.
The escalating violence has prompted a formal warning from the Professional Association of Civil Guards (AUGC), which states its officers are being left ‘defenceless’ on the front line.
The association warns patrols sent to protect the beached vessel are exposed due to a lack of essential equipment such as long guns or night-vision gear.
READ MORE WATCH: Police grab €7.8m of drugs as traffickers are caught ‘red-handed’ unloading hashish from narco boat on the Costa Blanca
They are forced to operate in ‘completely dark’ conditions, facing gangs that are known to carry military-grade weapons.
This crisis is a result of the death, in late October, of an officer from the Portuguese National Republican Guard. His patrol boat was deliberately driven into by drug traffickers near the Guadiana River.
The Olive Press is a great source for Andalucia News.
