French navy seizes 678kg of cocaine from ship in Caribbean

The French Navy has intercepted a boat that was carrying about 678kg of cocaine, France‘s Armed Forces Minister said on Thursday.

Catherine Vautrin wrote on X that the cargo was seized and handed over to the Barbadian authorities, as the United States and other countries step up their fight against drug trafficking.

In a separate operation, 174 bales of cocaine, or 4.24 tonnes, were seized off the coast of French Polynesia on February 2.

France, which has overseas territories in the Caribbean and Latin American regions, has been pushing a more aggressive policy in recent months on drug trafficking.

The French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction published a report in December saying that cocaine had overtaken cannabis as the leading illegal drug in France.

Gang-related drug crime is on the rise in France, and during a visit to Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer, France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot launched a multi-pronged plan to fight an explosion of drug trafficking in Latin America, the Caribbean and increasingly Europe.

Paris has been pushing for a European Union sanctions regime to tackle the issue.

Source: independent.co.uk