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The fall of the European crime chat complicates life for the drug traffickers of the Strait

2022-06-27T12:56:26.513Z


The infiltration of police officers in EncroChat has led to thousands of messages that incriminate traffickers like El Pantoja and are already entangling their legal future


The beginning of the summer of 2020 was much more convulsive than the narco Jesús Heredia,

Pantoja , surely expected

, one of the great bosses of the Strait that, at that time, still had to be stopped.

At the end of May, 36 members of his gang were caught and he ended up wanted.

A little over a month later, he was arrested while he was eating in an Italian restaurant in Chiclana de la Frontera.

Between these two events, on June 13, EncroChat, the Whatsapp of European organized crime, launched an alert to its users in which it warned that they had been "infiltrated" by the police.

It was just in the days in which several members of that network exchanged messages in which they commented on the photo of one of the news of the Pantoja police messes.

That conversation has now been key to pointing out the drug trafficker as a client of EncroChat, keeping him in provisional prison and further overshadowing his already tangled procedural future.

More information

The Civil Guard dismantles in Cádiz the drug trafficking network led by El Pantoja

Suddenly, "about 3,000 messages" from EncroChat were incorporated into the investigation of Operation Barros, which, until then, did not even have El Pantoja as the main investigator, according to his lawyer, Manuel Morenete.

However, the chats point him out as a possible user of the network —with a pseudonym— in conversations that spoke without hesitation or detours about caches, postage from Morocco and money.

The consequence has been that, last March and a few days after being arrested for another drug trafficking case, the Cádiz Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office obtained the approval of the judge to keep Pantoja in provisional prison, given the new evidence that corners him.

He is not the only one who has been fully impacted by the shock wave of EncroChat.

The anti-drug prosecutor of Andalusia, Ana Villagómez, quantifies at least six open cases against drug traffickers that have been nurtured by the messages intercepted on this private network and another, Anon: two cases are instructed in Algeciras, another two in Chiclana, one in Malaga and another one in the National High Court.

In all the investigations, the information has come after the High Court and the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office requested, through European arrest warrants, the information from France, whose police, together with the Dutch, were key to being able to infiltrate the chat.

The data, downloaded with a secure copy, has ended up in the hands of the police and the Civil Guard "so that they try to find out the users of those phones",

Circumlocutions to hide the crime

Sometimes they have been women.

Others, strawberries.

They have even used references to time and tides.

The list of circumlocutions that the narcos have used to refer to what they really meant, narcolanchas packed with hashish from Morocco, is long.

So this time the researchers were surprised by the level of detail in the Encrochat transcripts: “A lot of information comes out that they thought was safe.

Boats on the water, photos of hashish, of money.

Everything they thought was never going to be intervened”, point out judicial sources close to the case.

The package of thousands of messages starts in April to June 2020, at which time those responsible for the network alerted users that they had suffered an information breach "by government entities".

Until then, EncroChat was sold as an encrypted and anonymous communication that took place on an encrypted mobile equipped with a messaging application.

“The server was in France.

The company guaranteed anonymity, all users were

nicknamed

[an alias], it had neither location nor IP address.

They charged more than 2,000 euros per service”, summarizes the same source.

The alleged presence of drug traffickers from the Strait of Gibraltar confirms the level of economic power and technical means enjoyed by traffickers in the area, always determined to be several steps ahead of investigators.

Of the 3,000 messages that now complicate the legal defense of El Pantoja, some "conversations between third parties that mention a press release in which he appears" at the beginning of the summer of 2020 have turned out to be key, Morenete points out.

However, for the lawyer it is not even so clear that his client participated in the network under a pseudonym: "I doubt that the user is him, but even if he were, they are caches that are not attributable to him."

And it is not the only reticence raised by the lawyer, suspicious that the way in which the data is intended to be incorporated into existing investigations is valid or legal.

"It's very green.

Above all, after the judgment of April 5 of the European Court that determines that mass storage is illegal”, he points out.

The truth is that the legal usefulness of the intercepted messages to drug traffickers remains to be seen.

At the moment, as Villagómez explains, resources have already been raised from the defenses of other cases on the grounds that the data obtained suppose a prospective investigation —against the person, rather than against a specific fact—, something that is prohibited in Spain.

"Until now, the National Court has considered it valid, because the way in which the data was obtained in France is legal," says the prosecutor.

But Morenete does not agree with that interpretation: “Let's say that 90% are suspected drug traffickers, but there will be other people who are not.

The Civil Guard has expurgated what has come to them and in the investigations they had they have cast them.

That is not what the Spanish judicial system says.”

With the doubt of what will happen, for now, the Provincial Court of Cádiz has rejected the appeal against the provisional prison of El Pantoja, supported precisely by all the Encrochat messages that have given a turn to the cause for which he is being investigated.

For now, the magistrates have rejected that they are at the moment of assessing whether they are null evidence or not.

"But

a priori,

he validates it," says Morenete.

We will have to wait for that trial, as well as those that will come from other causes also entangled with EncroChat, to confirm if the European crime chat has ended up becoming one more headache —of the many that are piled up— for the narcos of the Straits.

An increasingly cornered narco

J.A. Reeds

Jesús Heredia,

Pantoja

, has more and more open cases.

Last March he was arrested after ending up linked to the gang of El Titi de la Janda, an old acquaintance of the Civil Guard for his power in drug logistics.

At the same time, Heredia is waiting to sit on the bench in September —after two postponements— in Algeciras for the Poodle-Rubio Operation, the same one for which he was on the run and ended up arrested in June 2020. In addition to the Barros Operation, which is the one that has now led him to remain in provisional prison on account of the new evidence located in EncroChat, El Pantoja is also being investigated for the cause of the Rúa Mar, the fishing boat that sank in early 2020 apparently packed with bales of hashish and left six dead. 

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-06-27

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