The Senegalese navy has seized nearly three tonnes of cocaine from a ship off the coast of Senegal, marking one of the country’s biggest drug hauls, according to naval and military sources.
Details of the ship’s origin, its crew, and the value of the intercepted cargo had yet to be disclosed by the authorities.
The cocaine was seized from a ship intercepted 150km off the Senegalese capital, Dakar, according to an announcement made on social platform X (formerly Twitter). The confiscated cargo contained 2.975 tonnes of pure cocaine, a senior military official told French news agency AFP.
Authorities intercepted the ship late Sunday night, according to a Senegalese army communique issued on Tuesday. It was subsequently escorted to a naval base in Dakar for “identification and tallying of the seized goods.”
Viewed for a long time as a mere transit point for drugs produced in Latin America, West and Central Africa have also emerged as significant consumption regions, based on an annual report published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in 2023.
Between 2019 and 2022, at least 57 tonnes of cocaine were intercepted in, or en route to, West Africa, chiefly in Cape Verde (16.6 tonnes), Senegal (4.7 tonnes) and Benin (3.9 tonnes), according to the UNODC report.
In January, over 800kg of cocaine were seized from a ship off Dakar by the Senegalese navy. The Senegalese Customs also reported seizing 300 kg of cocaine, valued at almost €37 million, from a refrigerated truck arriving from neighbouring Mali in October 2022.
