Crackdown in Corsican drug trafficking.
"An open-air deal point", weighing half a million euros according to investigators' estimates, was dismantled in Ajaccio, said the public prosecutor, Nicolas Septe, on Monday.
Located "in the heart of the Cannes district" in the port city, the deal point was dismantled on October 17 and 18, as part of a preliminary investigation opened by the Ajaccio prosecutor's office, the magistrate announced in a press release.
The investigation revealed that this "open-air deal point was manned from morning to evening by a man with the appearance of a homeless person and by two other associates", with up to "a hundred sales per day ".
“In three months of activity”, this traffic had “generated revenues of more than 475,000 euros”, according to projections and estimates made by the investigators.
“Real open-air stand”
The four individuals arrested during this operation were sentenced on Friday by the criminal court.
In a state of legal recidivism, "the main organizer of this real open-air stand supplying the entire Ajaccian basin with heroin, cocaine, cannabis and methadone tablets" was sentenced to four years in prison, specifies the magistrate.
The other three were sentenced, for two of them, to two years in prison with continued detention and for the last to one year accompanied by probation.
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"The fight against drug trafficking will further intensify in Ajaccio but also throughout the southern Corsica department in order to dry up the hidden sources of income that these lucrative trafficking conceal for their organizers and to prevent young Corsicans from fall into addiction", warned the prosecutor, who has made the fight against this trafficking and the "laundering of the sums of money generated", "a priority objective of the prosecution".
Many investigations are ongoing, he concluded.
Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced this summer a "strengthening of judicial resources" to prevent Corsica, with 340,000 inhabitants, from becoming "the hub of drugs in the Mediterranean".