Empty cans, a packaging machine to introduce the goods and legal labels. Everything was well organised on a pallet of black olives that was travelling by road from Vélez-Málaga to Lithuania. What seemed to be a legal business was actually a creative formula by a group of drug traffickers to transport marijuana to the Eastern European country. The National Police have seized 60 kilos of this narcotic and arrested three of the leaders of the organisation, of Lithuanian nationality, who have already been sent to prison.
In recent years, investigators on the Costa del Sol have dismantled gangs that hid hashish and marijuana in cans of tomatoes, others did so in boxes of biscuits or even under shipments of onions – to mask the smell – and even a drug trafficker built his own ornamental fountains and homemade ovens to hide the substances inside before they were sent abroad. This time, however, they hid the cannabis inside containers that they labelled as olives for transport to Lithuania, almost 4,000 kilometres by road from Malaga.
The investigation was led by the Organised Crime Group of the National Police Station in Fuengirola. The agents became aware at the beginning of this month of the existence of a drug trafficking gang that was supposedly sending marijuana to Eastern Europe from the coast of Malaga. The investigation allowed them to reach a house located in Vélez-Málaga, which served as a centre of operations and which had just been searched on two previous occasions also for issues related to drug trafficking.
There they discovered that the traffickers had acquired a canning machine and dozens of empty cans exactly the same as those on a pallet of olives that they also bought from a company not connected to the scheme. They then hid bags of marijuana in the cans, which they sealed with the specific machinery for this purpose and then placed the labels of the legal pickles on their containers. Later they organized the merchandise on the same pallet – they had a sketch to place each can in exactly the same place – and wrapped it exactly the same as they received it, as if they had not touched it. In addition, they calculated the total tare weight of the pallet and compensated for the lower weight of the marijuana by filling other cans with sand, which they placed at the bottom. Only the first row actually contained olives.
According to the investigation, they hired a legal logistics company based in Alhaurín de la Torre —a municipality on the outskirts of the city of Málaga— to store the goods and then transport the cargo to Lithuania, where substances such as hashish and marijuana are more expensive than in Spain. If in Spain the average cost of a kilo is about 1,900 euros, there it costs three times as much.
On August 13, the agents searched the house, where they found documentation indicating that this was the third shipment after others made, also destined for Lithuania, in April 2023 and May 2024. They also acted in the cold storage rooms, where they found up to 60 kilos of marijuana buds hidden in a hundred cans of pickles. The National Police accuse them of the crimes of drug trafficking and belonging to a criminal group. The arrested were placed at the disposal of the Investigative Court number 1 of Vélez-Málaga, which ordered the remand of all three.
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Fountains, tomatoes or furniture
In January last year, the Civil Guard and the National Police seized 22 tons of hashish camouflaged in thousands of units of fake tomatoes – which were nothing more than bright red paper – when they were ready to be exported to France.
In other operations, police forces also found chopped marijuana ready for consumption in biscuit boxes during an operation in which they dismantled a gang that included a craftsman who made ornamental garden fountains, ceramic ovens and other structures made of cement, metal, wood or plastic to hide hashish, marijuana and amphetamines in powder form before they were sent to Sweden. The use of tomato cans is also another classic in the sector, as are tinned food jars or the shipment of vacuum-packed cannabis under tons of fruit, sacks of potatoes or vegetables such as onions, whose smell makes it easier to hide that of marijuana. Sports bags, painting materials, furniture or even humanitarian aid are other of the many hiding places used by drug traffickers to try to avoid police forces.
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