The first time in Spain heard of submarines and of drugs things did not end well. In November 2019, three men tried to introduce 3,000 kilograms of cocaine sailing the Atlantic Ocean aboard a 20-meter-long bathyscaphe – which did not submerge completely – but they ended up stranded on the Galician coast by a patrol from the Civil Guard who discovered them coming out of the sea, exhausted after a journey of almost a month, tired of waiting for buyers to pick up their bales. The plan did not work but it gave for a series of Daniel Calparsoro that Amazon-Prime premiered this past February.
Drug traffickers’ attempts to circumvent police checkpoints under the sea have been rather rare. But a father and a son of Castellar de la Frontera (Gibraltar field) set out to try something new: remote controlled submarines. They designed them, built them and offered them to dealers in Europe. There was nothing similar in the history of Spanish drug trafficking. Actually, they didn’t just sell ‘unmanned underwater vehicles’, as unmanned submersibles are known. This Gibraltarian family created specific transport systems for each occasion. By all means: land, sea and air. The National Police he arrested them at the end of June.
Operation ‘Kraken’
The case was baptized by the National Police from the Algeciras police station under the name of ‘kraken’ in honor of the mythological being that lived in the depths and sank entire ships. The ‘Kraken’, shaped like a giant squid, is also the monster that devours the captain Jack Sparrow at the end of the second installment of Pirates of the Caribbean. The investigation lasted 14 months.
It started in April 2021, when the police learned that Castellar de la Frontera attracted members of international criminal organizations. “We started with the monitoring and surveillance and discovered what those mafias were looking for,” he tells EL PERIÓDICO Juan Antonio Sillero, chief inspector of the state body. They came to meet a father and a son, two men of Spanish nationality and with knowledge of mechanics and aeronautics, who had specialized in designing remote-controlled devices to circumvent police surveillance that tries to prevent the entry of drugs into the European continent. “They had commercials who did the work of contacting the mafias and selling the products,” explains chief inspector Sillero. The researchers are aware of business with members of organizations based in the Costa del Solin Equalizer (Catalonia), in France or with representatives of the mocro mob –Moroccan mafia– installed in Denmark.
the submarines
They had designed three submarines capable of carrying almost 200 kilograms of drugs. The investigations indicate that they had been sold to french traffickers that they intended to load them with cocaine. But they do not know if they were going to be used to cross the Strait of Gibraltar or French channels. For each device they had paid €100,000. One was ready to be delivered and the other two, at the time of dismantling, were almost finished.
Strictly speaking, they are not submarines because they are also semi-submersibles. That is, the immersion is not complete. There is a small part of the ship that remains above the surface, although the waterline is high and the grace of the invention, explains Sillero, is that they are very difficult to see at sea. If there is a little swell, they are almost invisible. They are managed remotely through GPS, without having to go through any of the hardships suffered by the three smugglers of the Galician submarine, and can cover distances of up to 50 kilometers.
The drug lords
In the operation, the policemen also intercepted six narcodrones equipped with 12 engines. Previous attempts to move drugs with drones were known, but not with such large devices. Those who had designed this family could travel distances of between 30 or 40 kilometers and transport loads, presumably hashish, up to 40 kilograms.
The technology allowed the narcodrone to be controlled through an electronic tablet. Each of these devices had a value of 50,000 euros. And like submarines, they hadn’t been built by hacking purchased drones. “They had been made piece by piece, by hand,” says Sillero.
The ‘coves’
In addition to submarines and narco-drones, to cover long distances by road, father and son also prepared vehicles. They opened secret compartments in the structure of the cars, the so-called ‘coves’, which made it possible to hide considerable quantities of drugs. Following one of those vehicles, the National Police reached an organization that had contracted their services and that operated from Catalonia. Investigators inspected the garage in which the car had been hidden in Equalizer and they found 9 kilograms of marijuana prepared to be sold.
Related news
There are still no arrests in Igualada, nor are there any in France or Denmark. But the ‘Kraken’ operation, by thoroughly investigating a ‘logistics company’ that worked for criminal organizations, has obtained information from these latter that the National Police has now shared with security forces from other countries, who will be able to continue pulling the thread. .
Father and son were arrested a few days ago. Several of the commercials who acted as a link between this family gang and the European mafias were also arrested.