The ship was intercepted overnight from Sunday to Monday, and was then escorted to a naval base in Dakar, the Senegalese army announced.
The Senegalese army has seized nearly three tonnes of cocaine from a ship boarded off the coast of Senegal, one of the largest catches in the country, we learned on Tuesday from the navy and a military official. The authorities have not yet communicated on the origin of the boat, the crew and the value of the intercepted cargo.
A navy patrol boat “seized nearly 3 tonnes of pure cocaine aboard a ship intercepted 150 km off the coast” of Dakar, the navy announced on X (formerly Twitter). The seized cargo contains 2,975 kg of cocaine, said a senior Senegalese military official on condition of anonymity.
From a transit zone, the country has become a region of consumption
The ship was intercepted during the night from Sunday to Monday, the Senegalese army said in a previous press release. He was then escorted to a naval base in Dakar where he arrived on Tuesday for “the identification and counting of the seized products.”
Long considered a simple transit zone for drugs produced in Latin America, West and Central Africa has also become a region of high consumption, according to the annual report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Drugs. crime (UNODC) published in 2023.
According to the UNODC, between 2019 and 2022, at least 57 tonnes of cocaine were seized in West Africa or en route to this region, mainly in Cape Verde (16.6 tonnes), Senegal (4.7 tonnes ) and Benin (3.9 tonnes), according to the report.
More than 800 kg of cocaine were seized in January from a ship off the coast of Dakar by the Senegalese navy. Senegalese customs also announced in October 2022 the seizure of 300 kg of cocaine, worth nearly 37 million euros, in a refrigerated truck coming from neighboring Mali.
