“Stolen Red Cross Boat Pursued by Customs in High-Speed Chase”

the boat of Red Cross Maritime Rescuestolen last Saturday morning in Santa Pola was pursued by air and sea means of the Customs Surveillance Service (SVA). The three crew members chose to beach the boat on Saturday night on a beach in Cádiz on the Línea de La Concepción and continued their escape by land, where one of them could be arrested by Customs Surveillance officials.

The Association of Customs Surveillance Officials (AFVA) of Campo de Gibraltar has informed on its social networks of the recovery of this vessel by Customs in the province of Cádiz and has confirmed, as this newspaper has already published, that it was stolen “by a drug trafficking network to carry out refueling work and transportation of drug caches.

The semi-rigid boat stolen from the Red Cross in the Santa Pola port It is eight meters long and is equipped with two outboard motors 250 hp each.

Following the complaint filed on Saturday morning by the Red Cross at the Santa Pola Civil Guard headquarters, the theft was alerted and the Customs Surveillance Service located the position from the boat on the coast of Almería.

In that area the persecution began with a Tax Agency Customs helicopter and upon reaching the waters of the Strait, several Customs Surveillance patrol boats joined the boat and intercepted the vessel and caused the three crew members on board to choose to beach the boat in a La Linea de la Concepcion beach.

Once on land, where SVA land resources had also been deployed, the suspects fled on foot and one of them was arrested and transferred to Customs offices to conduct the proceedings. The boat recovered by Customs, in which there was a bottle of gasoline, was transferred to the Algeciras portwhere the Alicante Red Cross had planned to pick it up this week.

The Civil Guard is now continuing with the investigation to try to identify the two occupants of the boat that fled.

The Customs officers verified that in the pursuit the perpetrators of the robbery threw several bottles of fuel into the sea, which reinforces the hypothesis that the boat was stolen to bring gasoline to some narcolancha.