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Spaniards seize `pirates'

Spanish police have broken up a ring of alleged pirates who are believed to have spent the last two years plundering the archeological treasures of Spanish galleons and other historic ships that sank off the coast of southern Spain.

At the weekend, the local civil guard in Cadiz announced the arrest of two Hungarian men and an American woman believed to have set up an on-deck laboratory on their ship, the Louisa, where they used high-tech equipment -- including an undersea robot worth 600,000 euros (US$720,000) -- to illegally identify, salvage and treat artifacts from the wrecks. More arrests are expected.

Ships graveyard

The shallow waters in which they operated, a colonial-era hub of trade with the New World, is the country's largest shipwreck cemetery, holding an estimated 1.5 billion euros in sunken gold, silver and pearls, according to Juan Manuel Gracia, president of the Association for the Recovery of Spanish Galleons.

The treasures were the ill-fated cargo of 800 overloaded ships that settled to the bottom of the Gulf of Cadiz from the 16th to 18th century.

The loot confiscated in the weekend's arrest included 27 cannon balls from the 17th century, three Roman-era anchors, a Phoenecian vase and bullets from the Battle of Trafalgar, all of which will be sent for analysis and preservation at the Center for Underwater Archeology in Cadiz.

The treasure-hunters apparently located the pieces using maps translated from old Spanish and photocopies of other documents found in the Archive of the Indies, in Seville.

The alleged pirates navigated the depths using four global positioning satellite system receivers, eight underwater metal detectors, a 30m suction hose and two sonars sending out signals from the seabed.

The rest of the confiscated cargo attests to the world the underwater scavengers apparently inhabited, civil guard commander Antonio Dichas told reporters on Saturday.

Police found five M-16 assault rifles, a semi-automatic shotgun and cartridges on the Louisa.

"They had no other justification for the weapons than to defend themselves from other plunderers," Dichas told Spanish daily El Mundo.

`Hidden compartments'

To hide their finds from rivals and authorities at the Port of Santa Maria, where they had been docked since 2004, the ring used oxygen tanks with hidden compartments, police said.

Many companies use similar high-tech equipment to legally salvage wrecks in the US, Latin America and the Caribbean. But in Spain, the government has refused to grant permission to search and salvage, Gracia said.

He founded the Association for Recovery of Spanish Galleons in 1996 to push the government into taking greater initiative in recovering Spain's lost treasures before other countries scour the seabed.
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