Conviction of the authors of the "largest" cache of heroin in Spain: drug between cement and fruit pulp

Two agents move the bags of heroin they found inside sacks of cement, in November 2017. Ministry of the Interior

Nine twenty-foot containers left for Barcelona from the port of Tekirdag, in the Turkish region of Marmara, to go down in the history of organized crime in Spain.

Inside three of them, each about six meters long, a group of drug traffickers kept their best secret: almost 1,000 bags of high-purity heroin, hidden in sacks filled with cement.

In total, more than 250 kilos of this substance that, according to the summary, would have exceeded 15 million euros in the market.

These are part of the "largest" stash of this drug intervened in the history of this country, according to the Police, who seized another 70 kilos of said narcotic from the gang that they had previously introduced, in addition to 1,500 kilos of cocaine dissolved in 120 drums with fruit pulp waiting in the Port of Buenaventura (Colombia).

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The narco settles accounts in the garden of Murcia

The seven members of the gang, including the leader – a 46-year-old Spaniard living in Terrassa (Barcelona), whom everyone referred to as “the boss” – sat on the bench in June and July.

Throughout four days, the drug traffickers deployed different maneuvers to try to get acquitted: they tried to cancel the phone taps that implicated them;

two of them said they did not know what the containers contained and attributed all responsibility to the ringleader, whom they described as "persuasive" or "deceiver";

and the defense of another, an octogenarian businessman, even asked that he be declared incompetent for medical reasons and he came to the hearing in a wheelchair.

However, it was of no use to them in court.

The resounding sentence of the National Court, issued on September 5 by the Second Section of the Criminal Chamber, describes a gang specialized in the large-scale introduction of cocaine from South America and heroin from Turkey through "ships and aircraft”.

A network directed from Barcelona, ​​with "infrastructure inside and outside of Spain", and with tentacles in Germany and Belgium.

Thus, the ruling underlines that, once the merchandise arrived in Catalonia, the group worked with

dealers for its distribution -such as those in the neighborhoods of San Roque (Badalona) and El Raval (Barcelona)-, but it also "proposed" to move your product by other EU countries.

The investigation revealed that the group used a warehouse in the Els Comtals industrial estate (Manresa, Barcelona), where they hid containers that were unloaded in the port of Barcelona.

In this way, they could "manipulate" the drug without anyone seeing them, according to the court's resolution.

In addition, the criminals designed a business network to "simulate" that they imported legal merchandise from other countries, among which they actually hid the drug.

The companies include Caravanas del Vallés SL and Global Jori Food SL

A policeman checks more packages of heroin intervened to the plot in briefcases, which the boss kept, among others.

At the top of the organization were two Spaniards.

The boss, sentenced to 20 years in prison, had the "international contacts to obtain heroin and cocaine at origin";

“he had the drug and the cutting material in his possession”;

and he captured the rest of the members and distributed the functions of each one, according to the sentence, where it is detailed that he also seized several weapons: two pistols, a revolver and two daggers.

This defendant was responsible for personally recruiting his second, who had worked in the import-export of containerized goods to Spain and who put his knowledge and agenda at the service of the plot.

This police action was a real milestone in the fight against drug trafficking.

In the words of the agents themselves, it was the "largest seizure of heroin in a single operation in the history of Spain."

In fact, the more than 300 kilos triggered the Interior statistics, which reached 524 kilos of this drug seized in 2017.

That figure pulverizes the usual records of the last exercises, since among all the security forces they do not manage to apprehend 300 kilos in a whole year —238 kilos in 2021;

179, in 2020;

234 in 2019...—.

You have to go back to 2008 to find similar data (548 kilos);

or to 2001 (630);

or already at ninety and eighty, when more was confiscated throughout the year (for example, 1,159 kilos in 1999), according to the Ministry's reports.

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