14 DAY TRIAL // On Friday, Australia's Defense Department announced that more than a tonne of heroin worth almost $268 million (€193.7 million) was seized from a sailing boat in the Indian Ocean.
According to Daily Mail, a warship patrolling the ocean intercepted the sailing vessel on Wednesday night 27 nautical miles (50 km) east of Kenya’s port city of Mombasa. The HMAS Darwin's crew found 1,023kg (2,255 pounds) of heroin on board the boat, which was described as a dhow by news agencies.
The drugs were packaged in 46 sacks and hidden in bags of cement. It was a record haul for the Combined Taskforce 150, based out of Bahrain. The entire capture, with an estimated street value of about $268 / €193.7 million was confiscated and destroyed, officials say.
“This is a major heroin seizure, which has removed a major source of funding from terrorist criminal networks,” Commander Terry Morrison of HMAS Darwin said.
The record haul shows that drug traffickers are turning to the African route to smuggle drugs from Afghanistan into Britain and North America, because the region is known for its easily penetrable borders. There has been a significant surge in the volume of heroin smuggled through eastern Africa in the past few years, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Earlier this month, a Canadian battleship seized 130kg (286lb) of heroin from a dhow near the semi-autonomous archipelago of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean, while last year, another dhow was intercepted by a Canadian warship and it was discovered that the vessel was carrying more than 500kg (1,102lb) of heroin.
HMAS Darwin is a long-range escort frigate involved in different roles as area air defense, anti-submarine warfare, surveillance, reconnaissance and interdiction. The ship is part of a larger group of naval force, called the Coalition Maritime Forces (CMF), and it is tasked with preserving order in a huge area spanning over the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, Arabian Gulf, Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman.
CMF's goal is to counter piracy, militancy, smuggling and other illegal activities in the area. The force's Director of Operations, Craig Powell, said that the latest heroin haul was the largest in the history of the CMF.
It has been revealed that Kenyan authorities sustained that the seizure was not made within the country's territorial waters.
“I can authoritatively say that the seizure of such heroin never happened within our Exclusive Economic Zone. We are doing daily surveillance within our territorial waters and we have not received such a report,” Kenya's defense spokesman Bogita Ongeri said.