Heavily armed criminals recently wanted to rob a customs transport (right) to recover seized packages of drugs (left). Photo: rr
The Belgian judiciary wants to have a system in place by 2024 whereby seized drugs can be immediately disabled. National drugs commissioner Ine Van Wymersch and Flemish Minister of Justice Zuhal Demir announced this. The technology for this is currently being developed by the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO).
Seized drugs can only be destroyed in one incinerator in our country. This entails a security risk, as became abundantly clear in October when a – poorly secured – Antwerp customs transport was robbed by heavily armed Dutch gangsters who wanted to forcibly recover a large shipment of seized cocaine.
“We are victims of our own success,” says national drugs commissioner Ine Van Wymersch at VRT NWS. “There is no one who seizes such quantities of drugs, and only has one licensed incinerator to process those enormous quantities.”
“Plofkoffer”
The drug commissariat has been wanting to make the processing of seized drugs more efficient for some time now, and has asked VITO to develop a process in which cocaine is immediately deactivated as soon as the drugs have been seized – analogous to the explosive case used in cash transports. .
“This can relieve the pressure on security and customs personnel,” said Flemish Minister of Justice Demir. “If criminals know that you have lost your cocaine and that it is therefore lost, once the Belgian government has seized your cocaine, then there is no longer any interest in trying to retrieve it,” says Van Wymersch.
Scoop
This is a worldwide first. “Strangely enough, other countries have never been forced to think about this, because they do not seize enormous amounts of cocaine at once,” said Van Wymersch. “In Asia, cocaine is processed in a glassworks, in the sand used to blow glass. And in Ecuador they process cocaine in concrete blocks in building materials, but it is not yet entirely clear whether the cocaine cannot be removed again.”
It is not yet clear how the Belgian process will work. “The development only just started last month,” says VITO spokesperson Désirée De Poot. “But for security reasons we will not communicate about the details later.” According to Demir, the intention is to make drugs “chemically inactivated within two hours of seizure”. “I asked the researchers to develop a scenario in which the drugs are actually destroyed and can no longer be reconstructed. Lab tests will take place in an initial phase, after which industrial feasibility will also be investigated.”
The development of the process will in any case take about ten months, with all parties aiming for development by the autumn of 2024.
2023-12-27 17:07:49
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