Washington ? The Navy has seized a boat carrying nearly 2 tons of hashish in the Persian Gulf, U.S. officials said Friday, in what could be some of the first hard evidence of al-Qaida links to drug smuggling.

The guided missile destroyer USS Decatur intercepted the 40-foot boat on Monday. Aboard were a dozen men, three of them believed to have al-Qaida connections, and 3,780 pounds of hashish, the Navy said Friday.

“This is the first empirical evidence I’ve seen that conclusively links al-Qaida with the drug trade,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at RAND, a think tank that often does work for the Pentagon.

The Decatur seized the boat, a wooden vessel called a dhow, near the Straits of Hormuz, a narrow part of the Persian Gulf where it opens into the Arabian Sea. The area is a known smuggling route for al-Qaida, the Navy said.

The drugs are worth between $8 million and $10 million, the Navy said.

Military officials would not say Friday why they thought the boat, its cargo and some of its crew were linked to Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. The boat remained under the Decatur’s control, and it had not been determined what to do with the men on board, the Navy said.

Terrorism experts and government officials long have said they think that al-Qaida makes money through criminal enterprises including the drug trade. A United Nations panel reported last month, for example, that al-Qaida had financed some of its operations through drug trafficking.

Before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, bin Laden had been sheltered in Afghanistan by the Taliban, which had clear links to the heroin trade through Afghanistan’s huge opium poppy crops.

But Hoffman said Monday’s seizure was the first indication that al-Qaida was smuggling hashish, a drug made from the resin of marijuana plants that has a long history in the Middle East.

The boat above has been seized by the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf. The Navy's guided missile destroyer USS Decatur intercepted the 40-foot boat on Monday. The Navy said Friday that it believes the 12 men found aboard the boat have ties to al-Qaida. The boat also was found to be carrying 3,780 pounds of hashish.