Europe dismantles network that moved cocaine from Latin America

Belgium and Spain arrested 45 people as part of an international operation between police from seven countries against a network that trafficked cocaine from Latin America to Europe, European Union (EU) agencies and prosecutors reported.

The operation dismantled “one of the most active Albanian-speaking cocaine trafficking networks in Europe,” Europol and Eurojust said, adding that searches were carried out in more than 80 locations.

In a joint statement, the agencies said the suspects were transporting cocaine from Latin America to Europe.

“More than 600 police officers, in close cooperation with prosecutors and investigators, carried out raids against members of this network in Spain and Belgium. Actions were also carried out in Croatia, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands”, they indicated.

In Belgium, the federal prosecutor’s office reported that police arrested 30 people, carrying out 49 searches across the country, mostly in and around Brussels and Antwerp. It was not reported what materials were captured in that operation.

Belgium has become a major transit point for drugs to Europe. Antwerp, a port through which thousands of containers pass each day, is one of the main entry points for cocaine.

The Belgian prosecutor’s office said that most of the suspects live in the Brussels district, and that the trafficking network had storage points near the port of Antwerp, where the cocaine arrives from South America.

The traffickers, he adds, were in conspiracy with citizens of southern Europe who belong to mafia families from the province of Limburg.

To get the drug into Europe, the organization used cargo planes, private planes or ship containers sent to the ports of Antwerp, Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Le Havre in France and Hamburg in Germany, according to authorities.

Last year, Belgian police arrested several people in an unprecedented crackdown on organized crime after detectives managed to crack a communications network used by the criminals.

According to the Belgian prosecutor’s office, the detectives managed to decrypt the Sky ECC messaging service and thus identify suspects in Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay.