By Eddie Macfoy
Spanish police have seized a record quantity of cocaine from a cargo vessel that had departed Freetown, in a case authorities say underscores growing concerns over international drug trafficking routes.
Law enforcement officials in Spain said they discovered between 35,000 and 40,000 kilograms of cocaine aboard the ship, describing it as one of the largest seizures of its kind.
According to authorities, the vessel had left Freetown on April 22 and was en route to the Mediterranean when it was intercepted.
The seizure has drawn renewed attention to Sierra Leone’s vulnerability to being used as a transit point for narcotics trafficking, a concern long raised by international agencies.
Officials have not said whether the drugs originated in Sierra Leone or were loaded elsewhere along the route, and investigations are ongoing.
Security analysts say West Africa has increasingly become a corridor for cocaine shipments from Latin America to Europe, due to porous borders and limited maritime surveillance capacity.
Authorities in Sierra Leone have previously pledged to strengthen anti-narcotics enforcement, but the scale of the latest seizure is likely to intensify scrutiny of the country’s ports and monitoring systems.
Spanish police have not yet released further details on arrests or the ownership of the vessel.
