One of the UK's most wanted suspects has been arrested during a drugs raid in Portugal.

Lee Dryden, 49, was held with four others after the seizure of a boat with 178 kilograms of cocaine on board on the Algarve coast in the country's south.

Dryden, from South London, has been a fugitive for five years while Scotland Yard appealed for information about him.

He is wanted for questioning over an elaborate £400m cocaine smuggling plot which ended when a boat capsized during a storm and gang members and bales of drugs were plucked from the sea during a dramatic rescue.

In that scam in 2007, the gang had posed as holidaying fishermen in a tiny village in remote south west Ireland while they waited for the drugs shipment from South America.

They had picked up the drugs in a small inflatable dinghy and were heading back to shore when a storm turned over their boat. It was thought the boat's outboard engine had been filled mistakenly with diesel instead of petrol.

Various gang members, including a former Metropolitan Police detective, were later jailed in Ireland and London for up to 30 years.

But three suspects escaped and have been the subject of appeals by Scotland Yard's elite Projects Team.

One fugitive was later extradited from Spain and is awaiting trial in London, another is still on the run and Dryden is now in custody in Lisbon.

Dryden was arrested with another British man and two Germans at an apartment in the Algarve resort of Olhao where a yacht, the Delfin, was seized.

The arrests came at the end of a year-long operation involving the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency.

The operation was masterminded by a joint EU police and military unit the Maritime Analysis Operations Centre based in Lisbon.

A fifth suspect was arrested in Spain.