Marijuana dealers with Balkan war grenades ready to use

They were prepared to find weapons, probably war weapons, but not for three ready-to-use hand grenades. The National Police were searching the home of one of the leaders of an organisation investigated for marijuana trafficking in Salou (30,224 inhabitants, Tarragona) when the discovery was made. The man, of Serbian origin, kept three hand-held explosive projectiles at home. They automatically stopped and notified the TEDAX (specialist technicians in deactivating explosive devices), who secured the area and removed them. “They were all operational,” police sources explain. One of them was an incendiary type, which detonates a fireball. All three are from the time of the Balkan War, according to the police force on Thursday. To the drug trafficking crimes they will have to add the illegal possession of weapons, with the aggravating circumstance that they were weapons of war.

In recent years, an increase in the power of weapons seized from drug gangs has been detected, according to several police, legal and intelligence sources. The Prosecutor’s Office sees the seizure of increasingly powerful weapons as “very worrying”, and the police are beginning to reinforce the shielding of their equipment. In December 2022, the Police seized an entire arsenal from a Galician drug trafficker, which also included a hand grenade. The groups use the much more powerful weapons of war, especially in drug robberies that some gangs make from others or to protect themselves from them, according to police sources.

The organisation dismantled by the National Police had rented up to four warehouses for agricultural and livestock use, some in small municipalities in Albacete, Valencia and Teruel, to grow marijuana. The police operation, called Neskabal, ended with 10 arrests, including the two leaders of the network. According to investigators, the two leaders, of Serbian origin, coordinated and controlled the activity of the rest and lived in Tarragona. In an intermediate echelon there was a Spanish citizen and an Armenian who visited the plantations and were in charge of solving the problems of logistics and electrical maintenance. At the base there were another six people, of Polish, Croatian and Serbian origin, who lived inside the warehouses and carried out maintenance, cultivation and harvesting of marijuana.

Researchers highlight their ability to obtain harvests every 90 days. Their plantations were divided into sectors. In a first area, the marijuana cuttings were grown until they became plants. Then, they were transplanted to larger rooms, where they grew until they developed marijuana buds. In a third area, the buds were cleaned and dried. Finally, the substance was vacuum-packed so that it could be transported discreetly in vehicles.

The investigation began at the end of 2023, with information that indicated a possible intensive cultivation of marijuana in a warehouse for livestock use in the town of La Gineta (2,548 inhabitants, Albacete). The agents verified that several people regularly accessed the facilities and stayed for a few hours. Afterwards, they traveled to the city of Barcelona in rental cars. Little by little they discovered the location of other warehouses, in Utiel (11,632 inhabitants) and Fuenterrobles (688 inhabitants), both in Valencia, and in Calaceite (979 inhabitants, Teruel). They also discovered that they had front men, or straw men, to hide the people who were really renting the agricultural warehouses and the vehicles they used. During the four searches, the agents discovered sophisticated marijuana production centers equipped with the latest technology and seized 3,300 plants and 85 kilos of buds ready to be sold.

In 2021, 130 tons of marijuana were seized in Spain, according to the latest annual drug statistics from the Ministry of the Interior. The exponential increase in seizures of cannabis plants – more than three million were seized in the last reporting year – has forced the department headed by Fernando Grande-Marlaska to put out to tender contracts to enlist the help of private companies in dismantling the largest plantations, with more than 10,000 plants, and which are increasingly numerous, according to police statistics.

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