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AFP/Sofia

Bulgarian prosecutors have charged the owner of a cargo ship intercepted off Spain earlier this week with three tonnes of cocaine on board, and said they also planned to charge the alleged ringleader.
Doychin Doychev, who owns the Bulgarian-flagged Saint Nikolay, raided by Spanish authorities on Monday, was charged with “participation in an organised crime group”, prosecutors from the Bulgarian specialist organised crime office said.
They also said that they planned to bring charges before the end of the day against Ruslan Kolev, the suspected chief organiser of the drug-smuggling operation, who was arrested in Sofia together with another man.
Twenty-one Bulgarian sailors were arrested after the ship was boarded 80km off Cadiz.
Six Colombians were later detained in Madrid and four Spaniards in the north-western region of Galicia.
A high-tech Italian patrol plane spotted the ship and tracked it for three days before it was intercepted, Italian police said on Friday.
Authorities suspect the drugs were to be shipped overland from Galicia to Madrid.
Italian police said that the Bulgarians “sailed their ship into the Caribbean to load up with the drugs, after having received a green light from Colombia while the Colombians sent their envoys to Spain to coordinate the operation”.
Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said yesterday that Doychev had also owned another vessel, the Vanessa, sunk in the Sea of Azov in 2008, which “was also suspected of carrying a huge cocaine load”.
Bulgarian criminals have long been involved in international cocaine smuggling rings, while Spain is the main gateway to Europe for cocaine from Latin America and for cannabis from neighbouring Morocco.
Police regularly make large seizures.
Sofia extradited to Italy in late July one of its alleged cocaine-trafficking lords, Evelin Banev, nicknamed “Brendo”, accused of trafficking 40 tonnes of cocaine from Latin America to Europe between 2004 and 2007.

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