The Colombian navy on Wednesday announced its first seizure of an unmanned Narco-Submarine equipped with a Starlink antenna from its Caribbean coast.
The ship did not carry drugs but the Colombian fleet and western security sources based in the region told AFP They thought it was a trial run of an unmanned vessel by a cocaine trader.
“It was tested and was empty,” a navy spokesman confirmed AFP.
When asked if it was run by Starlink, the spokesman confirmed that the vessel “had that technology” but said the marine “still studied how it worked exactly.”
The discovery announced by the Navy commander Admiral Juan Ricardo Rozo at a press conference is one of the first reported finds in South American waters in a drone narco submarine.
It comes when cartels rise in the use of difficult to-detect submarines, usually with a herd on board, to smuggle cocaine across the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Manned Semi-Submersibles has been used for decades to ferry cocaine north from Colombia’s Pacific coast to Central America or Mexico.
But in recent years they have sailed much further away.
Last November, five tonnes of Colombian cocaine were found on a semi-submersible seized on the way to Australia.
