Spanish forces seize record 30 tons of cocaine in major international drug bust off West Africa

Spanish forces seize record 30 tons of cocaine in major international drug bust off West Africa

08 мая 2026 г.

Nadezhda Sorokina

A Spanish court file details a record-breaking bust of 30 tonnes of cocaine by Spanish forces in international waters off the West African coast.

Spain’s Civil Guard guard was acting on information provided by U.S. and Dutch authorities when it seized a ship last week carrying more than 30 tons of cocaine worth over $954 million, according to a court document obtained by OCCRP.

After the Civil Guard’s association announced the bust on social media, Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told reporters it was "one of the biggest, not only nationally but internationally.”

The Spanish court document — an “order of imprisonment” — describes the scene that special forces commandos found when they boarded the freighter on May 1 as it navigated international waters off West Africa.

“Hidden in the bow area,” they discovered a Surinamese man and five Dutch men carrying rifles and pistols. The court document does not mention the men putting up any resistance. 

Behind a metal door in the stern, officers found approximately 30 tons of cocaine in 1,279 packages. 

Spanish authorities had received a tip from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and the Criminal Intelligence Team of the Dutch police informing them that the vessel planned to offload the cocaine into several high-powered speedboats on the high seas. The boats would then run the cocaine to the Iberian peninsula, according to the court document. 

Aside from the six armed men on the boat, the Civil Guard guard arrested 17 Filipino seamen. All 23 are facing charges in Spain, including drug trafficking, illegally possessing weapons, and belonging to a criminal organization, the document says.

The ship, called the Arconian, was apprehended in international waters off the coast of Western Sahara, a disputed territory largely controlled by Morocco. The Civil Guard then escorted it to port in Canary Islands, which is an autonomous community of Spain.

The Arconian flies the flag of the East African island nation of Comoros. Until February, it had been flagged in Sierra Leone, according to the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency. 

The agency lists the Arconian’s owner as a Sierra Leonean company. Official ship tracking data shows that the Arconian left Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, on April 22 and was heading to the Libyan port of Benghazi.  

Sierra Leone is a major hub for cocaine shipped or flown to West Africa, where it is divided up and sent onwards, mainly to western Europe, according to organizations including the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 

A study published in March by the European Union said traffickers have taken advantage of West Africa’s “porous borders” as well as “high levels of corruption within port authorities, security services, and political structures.”

Sierra Leone’s government in February announced 52 convictions related to drug trafficking and organized crime, saying they posed “a serious threat to national security.”

More recently, Libya has emerged as a transit point for cocaine traffickers, according to a January report by UNODC. Drugs transiting Libya are mainly destined for south and southeastern Europe, as well as feeding “the increasing market for cocaine in the Middle East,” the report says.

Libyan authorities did not respond to emailed requests for comment, and no officials answered publicly available phone numbers. 

The seizure last week was more than twice as large as Spain’s previous record of 13 tons discovered last year in a shipment of bananas from Ecuador, Reuters reported. It’s also a record haul for Europe. The largest bust previously recorded took place in June 2024 in Hamburg, where German police seized 25 tons of cocaine. 

The latest operation has dealt a “historic blow to drug trafficking,” the Civil Guard association said on X.