More than one ton of cocaine has been found by anti-drug teams on a yacht near the Azores. A team from the police’s elite GEO unit boarded a 16-metre yacht en-route to Spain, and arrested a number of people on board who are believed to be part of a Serbian crime ring.

The yacht is now being taken to Las Palmas for investigation, and for the drugs will be destroyed. Portuguese police who seized a record 1.2 tons of cocaine on a yacht in the Azores this week were acting on a tipoff from French and British investigators, the French government said Saturday.

Wednesday night’s find on a US-flagged boat in a port on Faial island was the biggest of its kind in the archipelago, according to Portuguese authorities.

Four Serbians and a German aged between 29 and 54 were arrested. The French finance ministry said the operation was the result of a joint investigation between French customs and Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) “targeting a Serbian criminal group suspected of trafficking cocaine between the Caribbean and Europe.”

The drugs, which have an estimated street value of more than 70 million euros ($77 million), were found in four hiding places in the center of the vessel, the French statement added.