MADRID, Aug. 10 (Xinhua) -- The Spanish Civil Guard seized nearly nine tons of hashish in different locations of Almeria, southern Andalusia, in a raid against a clan of drug traffickers, security forces said in statement on Friday.

During the operation, 24 police records were made and fifteen people were arrested. The drug traffickers hid the 8,936 kilos of hashish in anchorages in the sea or storage rooms of the different localities in southern Spain.

They belonged to a criminal organization which established a drug trafficking network in Spain that worked with "large amounts of hashish", according to the statement.

The four leaders of the organization lived in Almeria and managed a highly hierarchical organization that even had expert divers who handled the caches of hashish once they were anchored in the water.

They moved the drugs in pneumatic boats from the North of Africa, threw it to the bottom of the sea with ballasts and took the coordinates with GPS.

In this way, when they found out later that the Civil Guard had not located the drug, the divers went for it and take it to Spain.

Sometimes, they used a hydrostatic lifting balloon to recover the drug.

This device can raise to the surface up to 2,000 kilos, and they tied it to a recreational boat or a fishing boat that moved the drug down the water to the coast to not be detected.

With the arrests, the Civil Guard closed an operation in which they had been working since March 26, when they detected a sunken load in the bottom of the sea.