Spain seizes U.S. treasure boat near Gibraltar

By Brian Reyes

GIBRALTAR (Reuters) - Spanish police boarded an American treasure-hunting ship on Thursday that Madrid believes may have taken gold and silver worth millions from a sunken Spanish galleon.

A Spanish Civil Guard patrol boat challenged the Ocean Alert after it left the British colony of Gibraltar, on Spain's southern tip, and confronted the captain with a court order to search his vessel, the Civil Guard said in a statement.

The boat then docked at the Spanish port of Algeciras.

Spain says the U.S. company Odyssey Marine Exploration has treasure Madrid believes could have been retrieved from Spanish waters or from a Spanish galleon which sank in the Atlantic during the colonial period.

Odyssey Marine Exploration, a Florida-based treasure hunting company, has said it legally recovered gold and silver coins worth an estimated $500 million from a colonial-era wreck code-named Black Swan at a location in the Atlantic Ocean which it refuses to disclose.

Odyssey said it had arranged with the Civil Guard for an on-ship inspection of Ocean Alert in international waters.

"To Odyssey's surprise, when the Guardia Civil did stop the vessel on Thursday, they informed the Captain that the ship would instead have to travel to a Spanish port for inspection," Odyssey said in an e-mail to Reuters.

This was "in direct contravention of the arrangement which had been agreed to the previous day and contradicted the representations of the Spanish Judge," it said.