Investigation of encrypted messages exposed the methods of drug traffickers in Europe

The Sky ECC investigation offered European police officers a wide range of cocaine traffickers’ methods, from payoffs to outright attempts at corruption, to threats and torture rooms in the Netherlands and Serbia.

“It’s like we’re at the criminals’ table”, summarizes Catherine de Bolle, director of Europol.

Sky ECC was a platform for the exchange of encrypted messages, widely used by drug trafficking networks, although an investigation that emerged in March 2021 allowed the dismantling of a gigantic drug cartel in Dubai and Europe.

Belgium and France simultaneously announced a first major raid, made possible by cracking the Sky ECC network’s security code, a technical feat involving Dutch police officers.

Belgian police arrested 48 people on March 9, 2021 after 200 searches, a mega-operation presented as the culmination of a job analyzing hundreds of millions of messages.

The investigation showed that the area of ​​greatest activity of this macro-cartel was in the Belgian town of Antwerp, the main gateway to Europe for cocaine from Latin America.

In 2022, the Belgian authorities seized no less than 110 tons of cocaine in the port of Antwerp.

The French justice was also involved in this case, since in 2019 it opened an investigation into an “undeclared” communications system, whose servers were in France.

In Spain, the Civil Guard baptized the investigation as “Operation FAUKAS” and carried out raids in Malaga, Madrid and Barcelona simultaneously on November 8, after having found, in March 2020, 698 kilos of cocaine in a container in the port of Valencia (east).

The European police now agree that there is “a before and after Sky ECC” in the fight against drug trafficking in Europe.

extreme violence

The mass of information is phenomenal, “more than a billion messages,” Eric Snoeck, head of the federal judicial police in Belgium, told AFP.

After a year and a half, more than 1,200 people were arrested and interrogated in Belgium and 510 judicial investigations were opened or enriched with information obtained from Sky ECC, according to official data.

The first observation of the study of the messages exchanged is the extreme violence resorted to by criminal organizations.

“They imported into Europe behaviors that were thought to be confined to South America,” said Rémy Heitz, attorney general at the Paris Court of Appeals.

“The terror, the murders, people executed in front of hilarious spectators. This is how this traffic is handled,” he added.

“House of Horrors”

For his part, Snoeck mentioned “completely unprecedented violence”, citing as an example the discovery of containers converted into torture rooms in the Netherlands.

“For a few thousand euros, because the contract has not been respected, they do not hesitate to kill after hours of suffering people with whom they were cooperating a few hours before. It’s chilling,” she recounted.

The messages exchanged in the encrypted network also made it possible to locate in Serbia, near Belgrade, a “house of horror” where the victims were dismembered and their remains ground up in a meat grinder.

Along with Dubai, where many of the ringleaders have taken refuge, the Balkan region also shines on the international traffic map.

After English, Albanian is the second most used language on Sky ECC, the researchers found.

Data from the app was shared with at least 22 countries, including Latin American states that serve as producers or transit points for cocaine, such as Colombia and Brazil.

In addition to the “Mocro-mafia” (traffickers of Moroccan origin operating from the Netherlands) and the Calabrian “Ndragheta”, Sky ECC revealed the presence in Belgium of “representatives of the South American cartels”, according to Eric Snoeck.

“I am very concerned,” said a French magistrate. “We underestimate the dangers of these traffics in terms of the destabilization of states and the violence spread to the whole society,” he added.

Source: AFP