French Winner raid criticized
PARIS (Reuters) – The French Navy’s dramatic high sea raid in June of a ship suspected of smuggling drugs has been attacked by Greek and Spanish officials for a lack of professionalism, France’s Le Monde newspaper said on Saturday. The Winner, a Cambodian-flagged freighter bound for Spain from the Caribbean, was seized in the Atlantic in an operation ordered by the French interim right-wing government three days before the decisive second round of the legislative elections. French Premier Jean-Pierre Raffarin had at the time called the operation «a great success against international drug trafficking.» Le Monde said Paris launched the raid without the cooperation of several countries, including Greece and Spain, which had been part of an international effort against drug trafficking between Europe and Latin America. The two-hour operation gave crew members time to dump crates of cocaine overboard, allowing the French Navy to recover only about 80 kilos of cocaine when the freighter was suspected of carrying up to two tons of the drug, a Greek anti-drug official, named as Rachovistas, told Le Monde. Spain also criticized France’s handling of the operation after a Spanish crew member was injured and evacuated to a hospital in Senegal, where he died five weeks later. «We are not at all satisfied by France,» Spanish Foreign Ministry spokesman Fernando Belloso told the paper. «Even if this man was involved in various illegal activities, there was no reason to shoot him during a patrol operation, and rather an odd one at that.» Le Monde said controversy over the French operation also arose in France, where a group of lawyers representing crew members criticized the «cowboy» seizure of the freighter and the legality of the crew’s 13-day detention.
