It is not the first time that its criminal activities have been discovered in Spain and some of its members have been arrested, but they have been arrested with a cocaine extraction laboratory. And not a small one exactly. The National Police announced this Friday the arrest in Barcelona and Cambrils (Tarragona) of six alleged members of the Farruku clan, a group of Albanian origin linked to the Balkan cartel and considered one of the most active in world drug trafficking. Those arrested were building a drug laboratory on an isolated farm with the capacity to process 400 kilos of narcotics in a few days—which had arrived on the Peninsula dissolved in construction material—and obtain a substance with a purity of 98%. So far this year, it is the fifth major drug laboratory dismantled by the National Police in Spain, although it is the first for cocaine. The other four were synthetic drugs.
The operation reveals a new step in the criminal escalation in Spain of the Farruku clan, whose presence in the Peninsula has been known since 2008. They began by committing robberies in homes – their possible relationship with the group that in 2007 attacked the businessman’s house was investigated. José Luis Moreno, although it was not proven, but they were soon linked to murders and to the cultivation and planting of marijuana, which they have come to monopolize. One of its alleged ringleaders, Kreshnik Budilla, alias Nikomanaged to escape from an operation carried out in April of last year in which fifteen of its members were arrested in Madrid, Málaga, Toledo, Barcelona and Cádiz for the introduction of 10 tons of cocaine and the same number of hashish in different caches that they had been intervened in different places in Europe.
The clan some time ago took the step of trafficking cocaine that it is directly responsible for bringing from South America in an escalation that “has allowed it to displace Colombian and Mexican organizations in Europe in the last five years,” as highlighted this Friday by the inspector. Chief Alejandro Martín, of the Drugs and Organized Crime Unit (Udyco) of the National Police. The group, many of whose members have family ties, is credited with great logistical capacity to move drugs around the world, in addition to links with the Calabrian mafia, known as ‘Ndrangheta, and Colombian criminal organizations, which provide it with drugs and labour.
Those now detained are not clan bosses but emissaries “in charge of the leadership and supervision functions of the laboratory,” explained Chief Inspector Martín. Along with them, two have been arrested chefs (term used in slang to refer to those in charge of processing drugs) expressly coming from Colombia. As detailed by the police, what was called Operation Korab began last April, when Udyco was alerted, within the international police collaboration, that two alleged members of the Albanian clan had established themselves in the province of Barcelona with the aim of set up a cocaine extraction laboratory.
The investigations made it possible to locate both of them in a chalet in the Catalan capital and detect that they were meeting with two people of Hispanic American origin. In addition, the alleged gangsters were seen keeping a large number of transparent bottles labeled as a dangerous substance in storage rooms, which turned out to be a solvent, essential to extract the drug that is camouflaged dissolved in other materials. He was also observed during the transfer of numerous boxes and bags to a farm near Cambrils, in a sparsely inhabited rural area hidden behind abundant vegetation. Coinciding with these latest movements, the suspects increased self-protection measures. They stopped using rental cars and began to travel by motorcycle, which made it difficult for the police to track them. Furthermore, the meetings held by the group members became fleeting and were held in public places, such as supermarket parking lots.
Finally, on May 14, and after the police detected a “frantic activity” of those investigated inside the property near Cambrils, the police entered the chalet and arrested the two. chefs Colombians and two alleged members of the clan. In the lower part of the house, the agents found a large laboratory with which they were extracting the cocaine that was hidden in a ton of a whitish construction material with a pasty consistency similar to plaster and known as terraplast, which had made the stash “practically undetectable” in customs records, as explained by Chief Inspector Martín.
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At the time of the arrest, the group had already achieved cook 25 kilos and was processing another 70 kilos through different systems, from the more traditional ones of filtering or drying in the eight microwaves they had to more complex ones such as the use of pressure filters. The agents point out that once the process was finished they could have put between 400 and 600 kilos of cocaine on the market. They also located 6,000 liters of chemicals (the discharge of which, once used, could have caused environmental problems in the area) and all the paraphernalia used to press the drug into one kilo packages. The other four members of the clan were arrested in homes in the province of Barcelona, where the police found 52 kilos of marijuana buds, with the sale of which the group supposedly financed the operation of the macro-laboratory.
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