Convictions are being handed down in one of the US’s biggest ever drugs busts.
A record-breaking 20 tons of cocaine, worth $1.3bn, was seized on the 9,962 teu boxship MSC Gayane at the Port of Philadelphia in June 2019. In court proceedings this week it has emerged eight crew have been convicted with one of them, a Montenegrin engineer, sentenced to six years in federal prison, and two others from Samoa handed five-year sentences. Other sentences are expected to be revealed soon.
The ongoing court case has heard how eight of the 22 crew on the MSC ship loaded the cocaine off speedboats that approached the ship under cover of darkness at several points during its journey between Panama and the Peruvian coast.
