Plymouth-based Royal Navy ship lands £11 million drugs bust in Middle East
HMS Montrose hauled in nearly two-and-a-half-tonnes of illegal narcotics seized in two back-to-back missions
A Plymouth-based ship has landed a huge drugs bust.
£11 million worth of narcotics will never reach the streets, after HMS Montrose swooped in on traffickers twice in two days in the Middle East.
Teams pounced on suspicious dhows in the Arabian Sea, resulting in a haul of nearly two-and-a-half tonnes of illegal drugs being seized.
The frigate - which is based in Bahrain on a three-year security mission - was on patrol as part of an international task force to stop criminal and terrorist activity.
"Having secured the vessel with my Royal Marines, we discovered the drugs in large bundled sacks, all containing individually wrapped packages. As soon as we opened the bags we were pretty confident it was an illicit substance."
Lieutenant Gorton RM - Boarding Team Leader
The scores of red sacks his commandos located in a 12-hour operation turned out to be packed with heroin – 275kg in all, worth around £5.3 million.
Just 36 hours later, the team was racing through the Northern Arabian Sea again in Montrose’s Pacific 24 fast boat to inspect another dhow.
The marines found an ‘Aladdin’s cave’ of illegal narcotics: hundreds of bags and sacks of hashish, heroin, and methamphetamine. It took them more than ten hours to recover them all.
The tally was 2,145kg of illegal narcotics in all with a street value of £5.6 million.
Montrose is crewed by sailors from her UK home base of Plymouth, plus her specialist Royal Marines team, with the entire ship’s company of around 200 men and women changing entirely every four months so the frigate can spend more time on patrol in the Gulf region.
She’s spent the bulk of her time since arriving in the Middle East in early 2019 providing protection, security and reassurance for merchant shipping passing through ‘choke points’ - narrow waters such as the Strait of Hormuz or Bab al Mandeb Strait at the foot of the Red Sea.