British frigate key to drug bust

Belize Police are at this hour still engaged in tallying the haul from Monday night’s massive drug bust at Hicks Caye. While a final figure has not been released, the forty-five bales of cocaine are expected to weigh in somewhere in excess of two thousand pounds with a street value estimated by police at around eighty million Belize dollars. Early promises of a police press conference have failed to materialise and details released by police press officer G. Michael Reid have been limited. The British Ministry of Defence has not been so reticent, however, and has described its role in the bust to the British press. Key to the operation was the West Indies guard ship, HMS Coventry. The frigate, featured in a News 5 story last week, was involved in joint anti-drug operations with the Belize Defence Force. On Monday evening, the ship’s radar picked up a skiff over thirty feet long running at high speed through Belize’s territorial waters. A Lynx helicopter was dispatched, with Belizean personnel aboard, which followed the boat as it took what appeared to be evasive action. The vessel failed to respond to requests to identify itself and after several hours eventually ran itself aground at Hicks Caye, a mangrove covered island between Belize City and Caye Caulker. The B.D.F. Maritime Wing and police entered the pursuit and while they were able to seize the boat and its contents, the drug runners escaped into the night. Although police have declined to speculate on the number of people in the boat, the British have claimed that they totalled four. The fibreglass skiff, similar to other Colombian boats seized in the past, was powered by two, two hundred horsepower outboard engines. While police would not speculate on the destination of the drugs, those familiar with the trade say that typically such boats, laden with drums of fuel, work their way up the coast of Central America and land their cargo in Belize, where the cocaine is broken down into smaller shipments for overland transport through Mexico into the United States. The same result is also accomplished by small planes from Colombia making “wet drops” of cocaine off Belize’s coast or in the many large inland lagoons.