It has not been one of the classic police operations of assault on a mother ship or a shuttle with cocaine, after several months following the trail of a drug trafficking organization. Nor was the drug seized in a port area, as is usually the case in container trafficking. This time, agents from the Central Udyco of the National Police had to track, during a journey of more than 160 kilometers, the transport by road of a shipment that a truck had loaded in the port of Vigo to take it to the province of A Coruña . The operation that ended this Tuesday has resulted in the capture of the largest cache seized in Galicia and the third in Spain, all of them captured in the last five years.
The Police have already raised to 8,000 kilograms the gross weighing of the cargo located in four containers that were unloaded in the frozen fish warehouse of the company Mare Azzurro SL, in the Espíritu Santo industrial estate in the A Coruña town of Cambre (24,500 inhabitants). The drug was camouflaged between pallets of tuna and was shipped in a port in Latin America that has not yet been specified, although it is suspected that it could have come from Ecuador, one of the points where the greatest activity by cartels supplying cocaine to Europe is now concentrated. The sale of this cache would have exceeded 265 million euros.
Identification of the ship’s position by satellite has indicated that the container ship that carried the cargo, Contship Zen, with the flag of Liberia, stopped at the port of Algeciras on December 1, and the containers with the cocaine entered Vigo two days later. The Police were expecting the arrival of a large shipment and the movements of this cargo raised suspicions, which made it possible to track the shipment to its destination, according to investigation sources.
The company that received the four containers where this enormous stash was hidden is the target of a thorough investigation. In fact, the Tax Agency, through the Customs Surveillance Service that intervened in the final phase of this police operation, investigates the documentation related to the company’s activity and can determine its degree of involvement in this transport. The four employees of the industrial warehouse arrested last Tuesday have been released after giving statements at the A Coruña Police Station, so they have not been brought to justice. At the moment there is no evidence that they had knowledge of the drugs hidden in the fish containers, while the Police try to locate the company’s top officials.
Identifying the group that organized this shipment will be an investigation in collaboration with international anti-drug information services. Behind this stash, the Police place a powerful clan led by Albanian citizens that operates in the trafficking of cocaine, heroin and hashish through European territory, and that uses Spain as a distribution point, mainly through containers. The Galicians are mere intermediaries for these caches that end up in the hands of multiple gangs for sale.
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Mare Azzurro SL, located 15 kilometers from the city of A Coruña, is dedicated to the import and export of frozen fishing products, mainly cephalopods, although its activity also includes the distribution of fresh seafood to supply the manufacturing and canning industry in area. But, in addition, the firm that chartered this shipment of frozen tuna has as its corporate purpose or activity the purchase and sale of rural and urban properties, in addition to buildings or constructions of all types and their urban development.
‘White tide’ of 15 tons of cocaine on Christmas Eve
In just one month, the Police and the Civil Guard have managed to remove more than 15 tons of cocaine from the drug market, a true white tide due to the enormous demand that increases at Christmas and summer. The cache prior to the one seized in A Coruña, weighing 3,300 kilograms, was seized in the port of Valencia at the beginning of December. The drug was shipped in the port of Guayaquil (Ecuador) between a container of sugar. Four other shipments totaling 2.8 tons were intercepted since mid-November in this same port, the third in cocaine seizures in Europe, behind those of Antwerp (Belgium) and Rotterdam (Netherlands).
The A Coruña cache is the third most important of those captured in Spain. The previous two were located in the port of Algeciras. The first, in April 2018, weighing 8.3 tons, arrived in the middle of 17 pallets of bananas. And the largest, weighing 9.3 tons, also camouflaged among bananas, was intercepted in August of this year.
The arrests do not stop. This Friday, UDYCO participated in another international operation on the high seas, in collaboration with the French Anti-Drug Office (OFAST), which allowed the boarding of a ship with 5 tons of cocaine in the maritime territory of Cape Verde when it was heading to the Spanish coasts, probably Galicia. There are 4 people detained, crew members of the intercepted ship, among them a Galician, Álvaro Castro Santos.
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