U.S. frigate just misses drug submersible

[unhappycamper]

U.S. frigate just misses drug submersible
By Philip Ewing - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Jun 18, 2008 7:29:28 EDT

The crew of a U.S. frigate fished four men out of the eastern Pacific Ocean on Monday night after they had scuttled their drug-carrying semi-submersible, Navy officials said Tuesday, but sailors couldn’t recover the vessel or its cargo.

The frigate McInerney was on its way to a port visit in Panama when its radar picked up the submersible in the distance, said Lt. Myers Vasquez, a spokesman for Naval Forces Southern Command. The ship was carrying a U.S. Coast Guard law enforcement team that got ready to board the sub, but by the time the warship arrived, the smugglers had flooded their vessel and it had sunk with its cargo.

“They might’ve seen them coming on the horizon,” Vasquez surmised, but he didn’t know for sure how the smugglers knew to scuttle their sub before the frigate arrived.

Vasquez said he didn’t know what drugs the submersible might have been carrying — although most such craft usually have a few tons of cocaine — nor where it came from or the nationalities of its crew members. As soon as the Navy and Coast Guard determined where the smugglers had come from, they would likely be returned to their country of origin, Vasquez said.

The McInerney sailed in April from its homeport at Naval Station Mayport, Fla. on a counter-narcotics patrol under the control of the Joint Interagency Task Force-South, headquartered in Key West, Fla.

Rest of article at: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/06/navy_sub_seizure_061708w/