The U.S. Coast Guard seized and offloaded over $63 million of cocaine in Florida on Thursday, including from an interdiction that involved gunfire and a vessel catching on fire and sinking.
More than 4,800 pounds of the drug were offloaded at Port Everglades in Broward County, the Coast Guard said in a post on X.
"USCG and our international partners continue to interdict drug smuggling ventures in international waters to reduce the flow of illicit drugs, disrupt transnational criminal organizations, and increase interoperability with our partner nations and interagency partners," the Coast Guard said in their post.
The drugs were found during two interdictions about 24 miles north of Puerto Cabello, Venezuela.
On one of the interdictions, a Royal Netherlands Navy ship with an embarked U.S. Coast Guard detachment in the Caribbean Sea identified on Tuesday a vessel suspected of smuggling drugs, the Coast Guard said in a press release.
The vessel did not follow orders to stop and instead increased its speed and changed directions toward a Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard boat, called a fast-raiding interception and special forces craft, or FRISC.
Crew members on the FRISC, which included U.S. and Dutch Coast Guard, discharged weapons at the vessel "in self-defense and defense of others in response to the life-threatening situation," the U.S. Coast Guard said.
The vessel caught fire and sank and three suspected smugglers went overboard. A search for the smugglers was suspended Tuesday evening.
Lt. Cmdr. John W. Beal, with Coast Guard District Seven, said the decision to suspend the search was not taken lightly and the incident remains under investigation.
Drugs were later recovered from the sunken vessel, a Coast Guard spokesperson told NBC News. Details about the second interdiction were not immediately clear.
Last year, the Coast Guard seized and offloaded more than 9 tons of cocaine from six separate drug smuggling events in San Diego.
The cocaine, which had an estimated street value of more than $239 million, was recovered off the coasts of Central America, Mexico, and South America. The largest seizure, weighing more than 5,500 pounds, was found on a narco-submarine, the Coast Guard said.
During another successful drug bust last year, officers with U.S. Customs and Border Protection found more than $10 million of cocaine and methamphetamine hidden in vats of jalapeño paste in San Diego.
In 2019, the Coast Guard captured a 40-foot-long submarine carrying 12,000 pounds of cocaine, worth more than $165 million, in the Pacific Ocean. Four suspected smugglers were arrested in that case.
