The ship ‘Mawashi Express’, which has been intervened by the National Court when traveling from Cartagena (Colombia) and its destination is the port of Said (Egypt), and is docked in San Roque (Cádiz) with some 16,000 cows, is being inspected on suspicion that he may be transporting drugs, according to what police sources have told Europa Press.
Officials of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) with the support of the National Police are in this, according to what Europa Sur has advanced, which has indicated that the ship is intervened under a mandate issued by the Special Anti-drug Prosecutor of the National Court.
According to what was published in the aforementioned local media, the ship was sailing through the Alboran Sea, approximately off Almería, and was diverted from its route to be transferred to the Bay of Algeciras.
The ship has been docked at the Campamento port facilities, in the town of San Roque, which has sparked criticism from the town’s mayor, Juan Carlos Ruiz Boix, who thinks that “the logical thing would have been for the ship to be taken to Algeciras”.
A question that has been answered by the Algeciras Bay Port Authority (APBA), which has ensured that it has “limited itself to complying with a court order” on the ship that “in no case planned to call at the Port of Algeciras”, as well as that the actions and decisions taken in the last hours, “with the prudence that corresponds to the case, are a work coordinated by public bodies of the competent administrations in the matter, that is, the ministries of Justice, Interior, Defense and Transportation”.
It is not a simple inspection, as explained by the National Police, it will last for several hours due to the large dimensions of the ‘Mawashi Express’ (195 meters long by 33.7 meters wide), and the direction of the actions corresponds to the US authorities.
So far it has not been revealed if the control has produced results in terms of the presence of narcotics, according to Europa Sur.
For its part, Verdemar-Ecologistas en Acción has also spoken out about the situation of the ship, warning that they were concerned about the “conditions of these animals inside that ‘floating stable’, because most of these vessels are former merchandise ships built more than three decades ago and whose purpose is not the trade in live animals, therefore they do not meet the necessary conditions”.
