A RIGID inflatable boat discovered semi-submerged beside a €440 million cocaine haul was found to contain diesel in its petrol engine, the trial of three Englishmen charged in connection with the drug seizure heard yesterday.
An expert on such boats, Paddy O’Connor, who is recently retired from the Irish Naval Service, told Cork Circuit Criminal Court that he had examined the engines attached to the rigid inflatable boat recovered from Dunlough Bay last July.
Prosecution witness Mr O’Connor agreed with defence counsel Blaise O’Carroll SC under cross-examination that “some idiot put diesel into it when he should have put petrol in it and the engine lost its power and ended up on rocks”.
Mr O’Connor told the jury of nine men and three women at Cork Circuit Criminal Court that replacing the boat’s original single engine with two powerful 200-horsepower engines was akin to the actions of a boy racer who puts a powerful engine into a small car.
And when Mr O’Carroll put it to him in cross-examination that in putting such powerful engines on the boat, someone had failed to heed the manufacturer’s specifications, Mr O’Connor replied, “Boy racers will be boy racers”.
“I thought the engines were particularly big for the craft. The original engine had been removed and these two larger engines had been retro-fitted afterwards . . . They were excessively powerful for that craft, both weight-wise and horsepower-wise,” he said.
Mr O’Connor was giving evidence on the eighth day of the trial of three Englishmen – Martin Wanden, Joe Daly and Perry Wharrie – who each deny three charges relating to the cocaine seizure at Dunlough Bay on July 2nd, 2007.
The case continues.
