An Estonian drug trafficker included in the list of the most wanted criminals in the EU was arrested in Alicante

Civil Guard agents take the fingerprints of Heldur Piiskop, arrested in Alicante.

The Civil Guard has arrested Heldur Piiskop in the Alicante town of Calpe, an Estonian citizen who for a year has been on the list drawn up by Europol (the EU agency for police material) with the most wanted criminals in Europe.

Piikop, 56, is claimed by the authorities of his country after being sentenced in 2018 to six years and nine months in prison for being part of a criminal organization that, four years earlier, had introduced large amounts of hashish into Estonia and the Scandinavian countries by means of vehicles that departed from Spain.

The arrested person was in charge of providing these vehicles to the organization, as detailed on Tuesday by the Civil Guard in a note.

The list of the most wanted criminals by the EU includes a hundred names and was updated last week.

It includes five criminals claimed by the Spanish justice system.

Among them, Abdellah El Haj Sadek el Membri, better known as

This European initiative began operating in 2016. Since then, the profiles of 335 fugitives have been released, of which more than 120 have been arrested.

More information

The 'Messi of hashish' enters the list of the most wanted criminal bosses by the European Union

The investigation that has led to his arrest began last September, when the Central Operations Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard received information indicating that Piiskop was hiding in Alicante.

The first investigations revealed that a person who could be him and who used a false identity had been arrested in this province, after which he had been released with charges.

The efforts of the UCO Justice Escape Team agents then focused on monitoring several people from their closest environment, given the impossibility of finding the Estonian criminal because he took many security measures in his day to day to avoid being arrested again.

The investigation allowed to locate, in the first instance, his sentimental partner in the Alicante town of El Albir.

The Estonian drug trafficker is the first member of the EU's most wanted list to be arrested in Spain since Europol updated the list on September 28 with the inclusion of fifty new names.

In total, the list includes a hundred criminals, some classified as very dangerous, wanted by the judicial authorities of the member states.

The current campaign focuses on the alleged leaders of organized crime groups, and therefore includes mafia bosses accused of murder, drug traffickers, human traffickers, hitmen, money launderers and embezzlers.

To encourage citizen collaboration, Europol plays with the image of a house of cards that collapses when one of the cards is removed to convey the idea that "the elimination of a key figure in the criminal network by an anonymous tip could lead to the whole organization going down.”

In addition to El Messi del hashish, the Spanish authorities have included four other names: Erick de Ventura Pacheco, Vassil Nikolov Baklarov, Nikolay Kurchuchev and Viviana Andrea Vallejo, alias