A hundred vessels suspected of trafficking drugs across a ‘cocaine superhighway’ to the UK and Europe slipped through the net last year, according to an investigation.

The ships were detected in the Atlantic but there were no boats available to intercept them, an international crime-fighting organisation said.

The Maritime Analysis Operations Centre (MAOC) monitors up to 600 vessels each day while record amounts of cocaine are produced in South America, director Sjoerd Top told the BBC.

He said: ‘We have the intelligence of the vessel that’s crossing the Atlantic… that it’s loaded at that time, and still we don’t have the interception assets available.’

So far this year, the MAOC, an initiative by the UK and eight EU member states to police the Atlantic drug trade, has seized almost 50

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