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On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Valiant <\/em>offloaded nearly six tonnes of cocaine onto a pier at Coast Guard Base Miami Beach, just three miles from the city's famous nightclub district – but the drugs are not for distribution. The giant $140 million haul will be destroyed, adding to the long list of multi-tonne busts that the Coast Guard completes every year. <\/p>\n The seizures resulted from six interdictions in the Caribbean last month, carried out by Coast Guard units with assistance from Dutch and Canadian partners. The first and biggest occurred February 2 off the coast of Venezuela, when a Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard aircrew spotted a smuggling boat and vectored in the Netherlands Royal Navy patrol ship HNLMS Groningen<\/em> to intercept. The Groningen's embarked U.S. Coast Guard boarding team chased down the boat and captured 6,200 pounds of cocaine, plus five smugglers. 12 days later, Groningen<\/em> hunted down another suspicious vessel off Venezuela and recovered about 570 pounds of cocaine from the water (though the suspects got away). On March 4, Groningen<\/em> seized another 550 pounds and caught two smugglers northwest of Aruba, after firing warning shots to compel the suspects to stop. <\/p>\n The Royal Canadian Navy's HMCS Harry DeWolf <\/em>contributed 1,650 pounds from a seizure north of Cabo De La Vela, Colombia, drawing on the skills of an embarked U.S. Coast Guard boarding team. USCGC Joseph Doyle<\/em> seized another 2,200 pounds from a go-fast boat off the U.S. Virgin Islands on February 2, and USCGC Valiant<\/em> captured a go-fast with 1,300 pounds off the Dominican Republic on February 17. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n A USCGC Valiant small boat crew interdicts a go-fast vessel about 50 miles northeast of the Dominican Republic, Feb. 17 (USCG)<\/em><\/p>\n "I am proud of the dedication and professionalism demonstrated by the crew of Coast Guard Cutter Joseph Doyle<\/em> in securing our maritime border," said Lt. Cmdr. David Radin, commanding officer of Joseph Doyle<\/em>. "It was a smooth operation working with Air Station Miami's forward-deployed aircraft to detect these traffickers."<\/p>\n A total of 17 smugglers were captured and were transferred ashore for prosecution in Miami.<\/p>\n maritime-executive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Thursday, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Valiant offloaded nearly six tonnes of cocaine onto a pier at Coast Guard Base Miami Beach, just three miles from the city's famous nightclub district – but the drugs are not for distribution. The giant $140 million haul will be destroyed, adding to the long list of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[1579,2476,1580,626,1222,4278,515,112],"class_list":["post-57143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-maritime-news","tag-coast","tag-cocaine","tag-guard","tag-miami","tag-offloads","tag-tonnes","tag-u-s","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/57144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}