A court in Caracas, Venezuela has sentenced two Ukrainian seafarers to nine years on a desert island prison for smuggling cocaine.

Authorities found 128kg of the drug on the Cayman Island-flagged cargo ship B Atlantic on 13 August 2007 at Maracaibo’s port, the Ukrainian edition of the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said.

In response to the 13 August guilty verdict, the Ukrainian foreign ministry stated: “We are saddened by this decision, and we will pursue every possible means of securing the men’s extradition to Ukraine.”

After 10 days, the two are scheduled to be sent to one of the most notoriously harsh prison colonies in the world, on the island of Margarita in the Caribbean