Britain, Gibraltar accuse Spain of entering British waters

At 2.40am on Sunday the Spanish police, backed up by a helicopter, entered Gibraltar’s waters without informing their Gibraltarian counterparts.

Spanish police also allegedly flew a helicopter over the Sandy Bay beach area of the island, in a move described as “extremely dangerous” by the Gibraltan government.

The Royal Navy escorted the Servicio de Vigilancia Aduanera (SVA) – Spanish police’s drugs and money laundering squad – out of the waters.

Gibraltar’s authorities said Spain should have sought their government’s assistance in seeking suspects once they crossed into Gibraltar’s territory, and said failure to do so resulted in the escape of a suspected drug smuggler.

The row is the latest escalation in the long-running dispute between the two countries over Gibraltar, which Britain added to its territories three centuries ago, but which Spain has had an eye on.

They blamed failure to do so for the escape of one suspected drug smuggler.

However, tonight Foreign Office minister Huge Swire reacted with fury to the transgression and insisted that Britain will raise the “violation of UK sovereignty” at the highest level.

“I’m positive I’m talking for the entire of Gibraltar once I say that we think about this has been a critical and pointless failure on the a part of the Spanish [police], which has had outrageous penalties in respect of the violation of our sovereignty”, Fabian Picardo, chief minister of Gibraltar, stated, the reported.

“Repeated incursions by Spanish patrols into the waters around Gibraltar are a clear violation of United Kingdom sovereignty”, British Foreign Office Minister Hugo Swire told the press on Monday.

“It was Spanish boats patrolling in Spanish waters to control illegal activities such as tobacco smuggling or illegal fishing”.

The smugglers jettisoned bales of drugs before hitting a submerged reef and abandoning their beached vessel with Spain’s customs service in hot pursuit. It beggars belief that the SVA have acted in this way that, in effect, has allowed a criminal who should be behind bars to get away.

Britain, which runs the rocky outcrop off Spain’s southern coast, said it believed the offending Spanish vessels had been pursuing other boats which may have been committing unspecified crimes. However it is completely unacceptable and unlawful under the global law of the sea to enter our waters without notifying us.