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Video: Police chopper chases down speedboat smuggler at busy Spanish beach

Beachgoers in Málaga were left gobsmacked by a sudden police helicopter chase along the shore.

Video: Police chopper chases down speedboat smuggler at busy Spanish beach
Spanish police have posted a video by a witness. Photo: Screenshot

A sunny summer morning at Sabinillas beach in the Málaga municipality of Manilva turned slightly surreal for beachgoers when they heard the sound of a helicopter approaching. 

Below it was a speedboat, ploughing through the waves at great speed and heading in the same direction: a packed beach full of bemused people holding up their mobile phones.

Spanish police have posted a video by a witness that shows the helicopter hovering just a few metres above the speedboat along the shore, as the smuggler then decides to crash into the shore and make a run for it on foot.

Unfortunately the bystander's camera skills go a bit haywire after that, but we do know from local Andalusian daily Diario Sur that the smuggler was intercepted by an off-duty police officer, just as the helicopter had lost sight of him along Manilva’s beachfront.

The smuggler is said to be from La Línea de La Concepción, a coastal town close to the Strait of Gibraltar that in recent years has become a hotbed of drug trafficking.

SEE ALSO: Brazen drug trafficking alarms southern Spain

The smuggler in question was first apprehended by the police helicopter when he was supplying one of the so-called “narco speedboats” with more fuel for another trip to Morocco and back. 

Police later said the incident could have had far more disastrous consequences to the public as the smuggler was carrying several barrels of fuel on board which could have exploded when the speedboat hit the sand. 

 

POLICE

Denmark convicts man over bomb joke at airport

A Danish court on Thursday gave a two-month suspended prison sentence to a 31-year-old Swede for making a joke about a bomb at Copenhagen's airport this summer.

Denmark convicts man over bomb joke at airport

In late July, Pontus Wiklund, a handball coach who was accompanying his team to an international competition, said when asked by an airport agent that
a bag of balls he was checking in contained a bomb.

“We think you must have realised that it is more than likely that if you say the word ‘bomb’ in response to what you have in your bag, it will be perceived as a threat,” the judge told Wiklund, according to broadcaster TV2, which was present at the hearing.

The airport terminal was temporarily evacuated, and the coach arrested. He later apologised on his club’s website.

“I completely lost my judgement for a short time and made a joke about something you really shouldn’t joke about, especially in that place,” he said in a statement.

According to the public prosecutor, the fact that Wiklund was joking, as his lawyer noted, did not constitute a mitigating circumstance.

“This is not something we regard with humour in the Danish legal system,” prosecutor Christian Brynning Petersen told the court.

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