The Civil Guard has participated in the international police macro-operation that, in recent weeks, has made it possible to dismantle a “cocaine supercartel” made up of independent but interconnected drug plots, which are considered responsible for introducing a third of this drug that is moves in Europe, according to estimates by Europol, the EU police agency. Among the 49 arrested are six of those classified as “drug lords”, all of them captured in Dubai, an emirate in the Persian Gulf that the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) considers a paradise for international criminals. It is about the British Ryan James Hale; Panamanian Anthony Alfredo Martínez Meza; the citizen of Bosnian origin Edin Gacanin, Zouhair Belkhair, Hoesny Ajaray and Rabhioui Bourfa, the latter three of North African descent. In the so-called Operation Desert Light, in addition to agents from the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard, the police of the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Dubai have participated, coordinated by Europol, and has had the collaboration of the United States , United Kingdom and Bulgaria.
The city-emirate of Dubai, with its 3.4 million inhabitants and extremely high standard of living, has become in the last five years a sanctuary for big drug lords, but also for money launderers, cybercriminals and fugitives of all kinds. Type. The immeasurable luxury allowed them to shamelessly spend their great profits protected by the supposed impunity in which they felt due to the great difficulties that the courts of other countries have to obtain their collaboration, despite the fact that the United Arab Emirates, the country of which part, belongs to Interpol, like most Arab states. “If a list is drawn up with the ten HVT [siglas en inglés de “objetivos de alto valor”, definición utilizada en la jerga policial internacional para referirse a los delincuentes más buscados]they will all be there”, say sources of the investigation, which considers that the results of Operation Desert Light go beyond the important drug seizures made in recent years in several European ports to this supercartel, and which is estimated at more than 30 tons of cocaine: “In less than two weeks, between November 8 and 19, we have arrested six of that list of 10 in Dubai.”
It was precisely one of those seizures, the finding during a routine inspection of 698 kilos of this drug in a container in the port of Valencia in March 2020, which put the Civil Guard on the trail of one of these plots, whose leaders They were hiding in Dubai. As it was what the slang is known as a consignment blind (without the knowledge of the companies that own the container or the legal merchandise it transports), then there were no detainees. However, it did allow the UCO to verify the existence of “a criminal organization that was introducing containers with cocaine inside through the Ports of Barcelona, Valencia and Algeciras”, according to the Ministry of the Interior on Monday in a note.
The investigation then went in two directions. Firstly, to Barcelona, the final destination of the container. The investigations made it possible to locate in this city the network headed by a Bulgarian citizen ―also classified as a “high value target” and previously arrested for a cache discovered in Algeciras― and in which four other people allegedly participated, including a worker of the port of the Catalan capital that facilitated the entry and exit of the containers with the drug. All of them have been arrested in Operation Faukas, as the Civil Guard baptized the part of their investigation.
Marbella was the second focus of police attention and where the drug gang that had tried to introduce the seized cocaine in Valencia was supposedly trying to launder the huge profits that drug trafficking brought them. There, the UCO has now dismantled a plot, with the arrest of a British citizen, who had laundered 24 million euros mainly with the purchase of real estate, but also luxury items such as jewelry and high-end vehicles, including a Lamborghini Urus, valued at about 300,000 euros. Along with him, five other people have been arrested, including lawyers and financial advisers, according to sources close to the investigations.
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The agents arrived at this second part of the plot thanks to the analysis of messages exchanged by members of the plot in the chats of the Sky ECC telephone application, presumably used by organized crime mafias around the world to communicate without their conversations are intercepted by the police, but which has recently been decrypted by experts from France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Among the 900 million unraveled messages appeared several from a person who used the alias of Stole and in which he spoke of the cache in Valencia, showing special interest in knowing if the loss of the cache had been the result of a police operation or theft by another criminal organization.
The Civil Guard was able to identify the Stole like Ryan James Hale, a British drug trafficker linked to the Irish Kinahan clan, one of the most important drug trafficking mafia groups of which several members have been arrested in Spain. Next to him, the person who used the alias was also named hassan in those communications. It was Anthony Alfredo Martínez Meza, also based in Dubai, and who was allegedly in charge of supplying cocaine to the six drug lords, for which he chartered ships loaded with cocaine from the port of Manzanillo, in Panama. From the conversations, the agents conclude that between them they could have introduced 10 tons of cocaine into Spain in the last two years.
The investigations revealed, however, that Spain was only one of the entry routes for the drug into Europe, and that the supercartel also introduced important shipments through the ports of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and Antwerp (Belgium). The Civil Guard assures in a note that the intention of the drug traffickers was to “flood” the continent with this drug, of which they controlled “a third of the total market, which makes the cartel a true whale in the world of global drug trafficking”.
The arrests of the six drug lords and other members of their organizations were carried out in a coordinated manner between November 8 and 19 in Spain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, which ended with the arrest of 49 people, 13 of them in Spain. The raids in Spain have taken place in Malaga, Madrid and Barcelona, where there were also 21 records. In these, more than half a million euros in cash, three handguns and numerous luxury goods were seized. In parallel, the Dubai police proceeded to arrest the six alleged leaders of the different plots. In the case of Hale and Martínez Meza, at the request of the Spanish justice system.
At the request of the Dutch authorities, Gacanin and Belkhair were arrested. The former is accused of participating in the attempt to introduce more than 2,500 kilos of cocaine and 7,800 of designer drugs into the Netherlands. The second is linked to six caches discovered between October 2020 and February 2021 in this country that totaled nearly 2,000 kilos of cocaine. The other last two drug lords arrested, Ajaray and Bourfa, were wanted by France and Belgium. For all these reasons, the Civil Guard has described the operation on Monday as a “historic milestone” by considering the arrests in Dubai “an unprecedented event”, which, in their opinion, is beginning to cease to be a “sanctuary” for organized crime.
Hashish, cocaine and fake viagra
The arrests of the British Ryan James Hale and the Panamanian Anthony Alfredo Martínez Meza are not the first of alleged criminals wanted by the Spanish justice system that have been carried out in recent times in the United Arab Emirates and, specifically, in Dubai. On September 15, the Spanish of Moroccan origin, Hajli El Harraj, was arrested in the latter. Also detained in Dubai is Alejandro SV, alias El Tigre, whom the Dubai police arrested when he was using drugs. Conversations on the Sky ECC application recently decrypted by the European police point to him as an alleged drug lord whose existence was known. Ángel Díez Gamboa, the alleged leader of a network that irregularly imported erectile dysfunction drugs from Malaysia, and distributed them in gyms and sex shops, was also arrested in the emirate at the beginning of 2020.
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