The National Police has dismantled in Los Alcázares (Murcia, 18,497 inhabitants) a drug production laboratory specialized in rosin, a new substance extracted from marijuana, of great purity and focused on use in vapes for inhalation.
In the operation, completed last February, investigators arrested 17 people, most of them in the Region of Murcia, but also in Alicante and Barcelona, who are charged with the crimes of belonging to a criminal organization and drug trafficking.
After being brought to trial in Murcia's 9th investigative court, the two ringleaders were imprisoned.
This is the second operation against a facility of this nature carried out in Spain in less than a month, after the one carried out in Arona (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 82,982 inhabitants), which resulted in five arrests.
The police operation began last October, according to sources from the Murcia National Police.
The objective was to surround a criminal organization made up of individuals of different nationalities that managed six large-scale marijuana plantations and, after processing it for consumption, distributed it mainly between Murcia and Alicante, but also in Barcelona.
Investigators suspect that the business spread throughout Spanish territory through different means, including the use of vehicles prepared with double bottoms to hide the stashes.
The thread followed by the agents led to the detection of a drug laboratory equipped with the necessary instruments for the distillation of rosin, a substance that is sold in a liquid state (it can also be solid) after extracting the psychoactive component of marijuana from marijuana buds. cannabis (THC) and subjecting it to different temperature, time and pressure variation processes, explain the same sources.
And it is gaining followers with the expansion of vaping.
Materials to extract rosin.
In the center, on a scale, drugs already extracted.cnp
With all the evidence gathered, between the 20th and 23rd of last February the agents proceeded to search different locations related to the criminal network, distributed between Los Alcázares, Molina de Segura and Murcia, as well as in the Alicante towns of Orihuela. Costa and Pilar de la Horadada, in which drug traffickers managed cannabis companies.
The operation seized almost 2,000 marijuana plants in different stages of growth, 32 kilos of buds, 1.5 kilos of rosin and various amounts of hashish and amphetamines.
The investigators also found that the organization, with a hierarchical structure made up of two leaders, locators of extensions of land for illegal plantations, caretakers of the product and transporters, had adopted "important security measures": during the searches, police officers They seized an electric gun, two compressed air guns, GPS location beacons, frequency inhibitors and even a National Police vest, which is usually used, they explain, for robberies between criminal gangs, known as overturns.
The operation ended with the arrest of 13 people in the Region of Murcia, another two in the province of Alicante and two more in Barcelona, the drivers of one of the vehicles owned by the plot that had transported part of the merchandise for distribution and sale.
The Murcia court that is investigating the case, and which has just lifted the summary secrecy that it had decreed, sent the two main members of the organization to prison.
The operation by the Murcian police is the second to be carried out in less than a month in Spain, after the dismantling of a similar laboratory in the Canarian municipality of Arona by the National Police.
In this intervention, the leader of the gang was a 29-year-old Italian citizen who cooked the drug in a clandestine basement and subsequently distributed it among several cannabis associations in Arona and Adeje, another Tenerife municipality.
The agents arrested five people and seized 1.7 kilos of rosin, 167 cans of rosin resin, 54 kilos of marijuana, 145 plants and two kilos of hashish, in addition to 15,000 euros in cash.
Marijuana plantation dismantled during the operation.
The photo has also been provided by the police.
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