Cartel Uses Cows to Smuggle Drugs to Europe

Illustration of a livestock carrier. (Wikimedia Commons/Tom Jervis)

JAKARTA - Drug smugglers are using livestock infected with the disease to smuggle large amounts of cocaine into Europe, a preliminary investigation report revealed earlier this month.

Up to 10,000 cows were loaded onto the 200-meter-long ship, The Telegraph reported, citing a source at the Maritime Analysis and Operations Center - Narcotics (MAOC-N).

"You wouldn't want to spend more than a minute on one of these boats, you can only imagine the smell. The authorities don't want these boats in their ports," an intelligence analyst for the MAOC-N said as quoted by Al Arabiya on December 20.

According to the report, the foul smell from several dead animals and their rotting bodies, along with the stench of animal feces in the surrounding area, made the authorities reluctant to search the ships.

In addition, police are avoiding seizing the ship because handling thousands of cows is a "logistical nightmare," The Telegraph added.

The ships are reported to use flags from countries with less stringent maritime regulations such as Panama and Tanzania.

The 50-year-old freighters sail around the Caribbean to collect cocaine packages from smaller vessels, hidden in the ship's giant grain silos and other storage areas, the Telegraph reported.

Somewhere in the Atlantic, the crew ties a package of cocaine to a GPS-equipped buoy and throws it into the sea, where it is picked up by smaller boats and smuggled across Europe through Belgium and the Netherlands.

The method has proved so effective that in the past 18 years, European police have only seized one livestock carrier carrying cocaine, The Telegraph reported, while clarifying that at least one suspicious livestock ship departs every week from South America to Europe.