Gardaí are due to start questioning three British men after they were arrested last night following the foiling of an €80 million international drug smuggling operation.

A Joint Task Force on Drug Interdiction team, comprising the Naval Service, officers from the Garda National Drugs Unit and Customs officers, moved in early on Tuesday morning to detain a yacht carrying a tonne of cocaine off the west Cork coast. But news of the operation only came to light yesterday.

The joint taskforce operation involved the LÉ Róisín and the LÉ Niamh detaining the 18.9 metre yacht, Makayabella, carrying the cocaine at about 3am on Tuesday, approximately 250 miles west-southwest of Mizen Head.

An armed boarding party from the Niamh boarded the yacht which was being crewed by three exhausted Britons. They offered no resistance and complied immediately with the demand to hand over control of the vessel to the boarding party.

The three men, who are aged 70, 35 and 28 and are from West Yorkshire, were transferred to the Niamh where they were detained.

Both Naval ships escorted the Makayabella to the Naval Base at Haulbowline in Cork Harbour at 11pm last night.

The three men were arrested under drug-trafficking legislation which allows gardaí to hold suspects for up to seven days. Detectives will today begin questioning them at the Bridewell and Togher Garda stations in Cork.

According to the joint task force’s statement on the operation, the Niamh, supported by the Róisín, “positively identified a suspect vessel in a covert operation” in the early hours of Tuesday morning and the boarding was carried out “at night and in challenging conditions”.

Crime gang

The National Crime Agency in Britain,which is involved in the international operation, also arrested a man (43) in West Yorkshire.

That man was arrested in the Leeds area on conspiracy to import class A drugs and is being questioned at a West Yorkshire police station.

The detention of the Makayabella and the arrest of the three crew members is the result of a carefully planned international operation involving police forces and other law-enforcement agencies from several countries.

The National Crime Agency in Britain and French customs received intelligence on the planned shipment of cocaine from the Caribbean to the UK and passed on the intelligence to the Maritime Analysis Operation Centre – Narcotics in Portugal.

Co-ordinates actions

It is believed the consignment of drugs, which was stored in large wrapped bales in the hull of the yacht, originated in Venezuela and was destined for Britain, possibly to be collected by a small boat in a process known as coopering, off the north Wales coast.

The drugs were last night being kept under armed guard at the Naval Base in Haulbowline but are expected to be transferred to the State Laboratory in Abbotstown for analysis to establish purity and street value.

The Makayabella, which was flying the Irish flag and which was built in Rhode Island in 1986, was more recently available for charter in the Caribbean. It is believed to have left Venezuela several weeks ago on its transatlantic voyage.