The Civil Guard, in a joint operation with the National Police and Customs Surveillance, has arrested five people in Spain and Holland for alleged crimes of drug trafficking, money laundering and membership in a criminal organization, linked to the intervention of more than 2,300 kilos of cocaine in Spain.
As reported by the General Directorate of the Civil Guard, this is the “Bandi-Hammer” operation directed against several members of an international criminal organization specialized in the introduction and distribution of large consignments of cocaine in Europe from South America by sea.
In total there are five people arrested, three in Spain and two in Holland, for the alleged crimes of drug trafficking, money laundering and membership in a criminal organization. The drug seizures for which they are responsible took place in the port of Bilbao in 2020 and in Algeciras between 2021 and 2022.
In Bilbao, 1,100 kilos of cocaine were seized in a maritime container from Ecuador, camouflaged inside a legal cargo of bananas. This uncovered a major international criminal organization specialized in large-scale drug trafficking, which had designed a sophisticated system to evade customs controls.
The network had created a network of legal companies that simultaneously introduced containers with legal merchandise with others with cocaine camouflaged as legal merchandise, or even in the structure of the containers themselves.
This arrest allowed the Spanish agents to begin the operation, putting them on the trail of this important international criminal organization specialized in large-scale drug trafficking. As the months passed, it was possible to identify several fruit import companies created to introduce large consignments of cocaine into Spain through maritime containers, all of them in Madrid.
A second arrest took place in September 2021, when the Customs Surveillance of the Basque Country and Andalusia, and the Special Response Group against Organized Crime of the Campo de Gibraltar of the National Police, seized 1,152 kilos of cocaine in the port of Algeciras. In turn, a third seizure of 96 kilos occurred in November 2022. All of these interventions were managed and coordinated by the same criminal organization.
All the evidence collected during the investigation was endorsed after an exhaustive analysis carried out for months by the Civil Guard UCO on state-of-the-art encrypted chat systems that were used by this organization with the aim of trying to evade police action.
Thanks to this analysis, it was possible to identify those responsible for this business network, located in different countries, who directly managed the introduction into Spain of these shipments of cocaine from their shipment at origin.
At the end of November, the final phase of this operation was carried out, with six home searches simultaneously; four of them between the provinces of Madrid and Alicante, and the remaining two in the Dutch capital. Five people were arrested in them, three in Spain and two in the Netherlands, all of them directly linked to the management of the cocaine consignments seized.
The detainees are charged with the alleged crimes of drug trafficking, money laundering and belonging to a criminal organization, for the introduction of a total of 2,348 kilograms of cocaine into Spain. Furthermore, the collaboration between all police forces has allowed North American authorities to arrest a prominent drug trafficker of Albanian origin residing in the United States.
He is accused of directing an extensive drug trafficking network that distributed cocaine in more than 15 countries, including Spain, and the possibility is being considered that he could have been planning the construction of an ‘underwater drone’ with the capacity to autonomously transport large quantities. of cocaine between South America and Europe.
The operation has been directed by the Central Court of Instruction No. 2 of the National Court and has had the collaboration of the United States Customs Services, the Dutch Politei and the US anti-drug agency DEA.
