The Spanish National Police and the Portuguese Judicial Police they have dismantled in Valladolid an important gang of drug traffickers, led by a “historic” narco from Bilbao, in an anti-drug operation in which They have seized 862 kilos of cocaine, hidden in sacks of charcoal, and in which it has also been an Ertzaintza agent arrested.
As explained by the national head of the judicial police, Rafael Pérez the “Operation Carvao”, began at the beginning of 2020 and it has been attended by fifty agents of the Portuguese judicial police, the central UDYCO, the Badajoz, the Valladolid and the Basque Country, who have been the ones who have carried out the searches in the homes of the three detainees.
An important gang led by JAPA, born in Bilbao in 1961, has fallen into it, which brought the drug from Mexican and Colombian cartels hidden in charcoal, and which has been located in an industrial warehouse in Medina del Campo in Valladolid. The other two detainees are an Ertzaina and an Algerian citizen. All of them have already entered prison. The seized cocaine would have reached a market value of more than 30 million euros.
Medina del Campo was a place of passage, since the final destination of the drug, imported from Barranquilla, was the Basque Country, following a sophisticated system to hide cocaine in charcoal that was practically impossible to detect by trained dogs.
The leader of the organization, without a record in Spain but who did remain in prison in Bolivia, had another of those arrested as a lieutenant and a third person also detained who provided the logistics.
The way of acting consisted of a network of companies with different social objectives, specifically real estate agencies and freezer food agencies, with the appearance of legality, which imported drugs from Barranquilla in containers.
The agents observed that these companies as a whole moved a significant volume of imports, especially through a Portuguese port, and sometimes worked with merchandise that had little or nothing to do with their corporate purpose.
The method to camouflage narcotics in coal is “novel” in Spain and difficult to locate, among other issues because the alleged perpetrators had transported 1,364 sacks of coal from Barranquilla and only 30 were contaminated with cocaine.
The police, who during the operation carried out searches in the homes of the detainees located in the Basque Country, They found out that the Valladolid town of Medina del Campo was not the place of distribution, but rather an intermediate point.
The purpose, after having obtained the drug, was to take the thirty sacks with the cocaine-impregnated coal to another place, where a laboratory extracted the substance, to later distribute it throughout Spain.
The identity of the three arrested, who are in provisional prison, corresponds to the initials JAPA, leader of the organization and born in 1961 in Bilbao, GMG, born in 1965 and AM, in 1969.
The Government delegate in Castilla y León Javier Izquierdo has highlighted the importance of international cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking and has valued the work of the agents in detecting the drug transported with a “sophisticated method” unknown until now in Spain .
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