In Portugal, police arrested a 79-year-old suspected drug baroness.
The Spaniard is suspected of being the head of a drug trafficking ring that smuggled cocaine from the Dominican Republic to Portugal, the Spanish police announced on Tuesday.
The woman was arrested in the northern Portuguese city of Vila Real along with two other Spaniards, aged 26 and 60, by Spanish and Portuguese investigators.
The group is suspected of smuggling cocaine into Europe through Portuguese ports using a front company to import corals from the Dominican Republic.
The Spaniard was both the boss of the drug trafficking ring and the managing director and owner of the front company, the police said.
The Iberian Peninsula is one of the most important gateways to Europe for drug traffickers.
Their methods are sometimes reminiscent of spy films.
In November 2020, for example, a submarine from Latin America with cocaine worth 100 million euros was intercepted off the coast of the north-west Spanish region of Galicia.
kim / AFP / Reuters