Two new people were indicted this Friday, June 9 in Paris in a case of drug trafficking with Latin America for which 12 people, including a customs officer, are already prosecuted, AFP learned from concordant sources.
These two men aged in their twenties and from Essonne, in the suburbs of Paris, were indicted for, in particular, importation of narcotics in organized gang and criminal association.
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'International dimension'
The case is related to trafficking that would have been organized from the south of the Paris metropolis including Mexico, according to a judicial source. During a public hearing before a judge of freedoms and detention, which AFP attended, one of the two defendants, who is accused of having managed the stock of narcotics in the sensitive district of Grande-Borne, assured that he had "never" transported "suitcases of cocaine". He was remanded in custody. At the hearing, his lawyer, Me Seydi Ba, had highlighted the "episodic" intervention of his client in a traffic of which he was unaware of "the international dimension".
For the second, defended by Me Harold Bataille and currently training to become a ramp agent in airports, the prosecutor had also requested the placement in provisional detention but he was finally placed under judicial control, with a ban on going to Grigny. In March, twelve people had already been indicted in this case, and eleven of them imprisoned. Among them is a customs officer working at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport.
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A source close to the investigation had indicated in March that it was a network "run by three well-known brothers of the Grande Borne, who have control over the traffic there", and that "it could be made up to 400,000 euros of profit per week". According to Le Parisien, which had revealed the case, a system of ghost passengers would have been set up at the airport, checking in but never boarding planes, unlike their drug loads. The customs officer "had been approached for many years, with very elaborate intelligence techniques, especially through social networks", and would have been paid 45,000 euros per suitcase from Mexico, to "close his eyes", had detailed the source close to the file. This former army soldier had paraded on the Champs-Elysées on July 14, 2022 for a nice cocaine catch.