In 2017, three boats had been intercepted in Polynesia, with 1.7 tonnes of cocaine on board. They had to go, at the start of Panama, to Australia. Eleven defendants of six nationalities will be tried at the Assises de Paris.
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Kalenda, Mojito and Guyana III were based in the enchanting panorama of Polynesian waters, so popular with boaters. Three catamarans that one would have believed in a pleasure cruise, if they were not each weighted with hundreds of kilos of cocaine and skipped by makeshift sailors in a hurry to leave the lagoons to fulfill their mission: to deliver the goods in Australia .
On January 19, 2017, at 5:30 a.m., the Kalenda was the first to put an end to its great crossing. It is arranged by the French Navy, on the faith of information from the customs intelligence services (DNRED), off the Marquesas islands, while a glougloute waterway in its hold. Cocaine breads float around. The rest of the stock is discovered in the fake ceiling of the cabin, for a total of 629 kilos. The Spanish crew (a 22-year-old young sailor, a 73-year-old sea wolf) is arrested immediately.
The mojito was arrested four days later to a few miles of Papeete. This other pleasure sailboat, full of 810 kilos of pure cocaine at more than 80 %, had also left Central America a month earlier. It belonged to the same owner as the Kalenda. On board, a Frenchman and a Panamanian return to firm land handcuffs with wrists.
Finally, Guyana III was spotted in the prey to flames, on March 30, 2017, not far from the atoll of Tuamotu. 236 kilos of cocaine are recovered in his charred shell before he dark. A new pair of exhausted skippers is arrested, after a nightmarish journey. The sailors were reduced to swap a computer screen and fishing equipment against food, on the island of Rikitea, shortly before launching a SOS.
the promise of capital gains Record
These seizures (1.7 tonnes in total) so similar come from a single case. The three sailboats belong to the same French owner. A single criminal organization, still nebula at the start of the investigations, supervises the crossings of its pseudo-plaisanciers at a distance. The survey, entrusted to the specialized interregional jurisdiction of Paris, will highlight an atypical and cosmopolitan sector, concentrated on the peaceful road of “coke” traffic.
From Monday, October 24, eleven people (ten men and a woman) of six nationalities, suspected of having participated in this international drug trafficking, appear in the Assises de Paris. The six skippers will be accompanied in the defendants’ box by the alleged logisticians of this expedition, orchestrated by “a European logistics structure and a Colombian management structure”, according to the indictment order.
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