The Colombian navy on Wednesday announced its first seizure of an unmanned narco-submarine equipped with a Starlink antenna off its Caribbean coast.

The vessel was not carrying drugs, but the Colombian navy and Western security sources based in the region told AFP they believed it was a trial run of an unmanned vessel by a cocaine trafficking cartel.

“It was being tested and was empty,” a naval spokesperson confirmed to AFP.

Asked if it was operated by Starlink, the spokesperson confirmed that the vessel “had that technology” but said the navy “was still studying how exactly it operated.”

The discovery announced by Navy commander Admiral Juan Ricardo Rozo at a press conference is one of the first reported finds in South American waters of a drone narco submarine.

It comes as cartels step up their use of hard-to-detect submarines, usually with a crew aboard, to smuggle cocaine across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Manned semi-submersibles have been used for decades to ferry cocaine north from Colombia’s Pacific coast to Central America or Mexico.

But in recent years, they have been sailing much further afield.

In November last year, five tonnes of Colombian cocaine were found on a semi-submersible seized en route to Australia.