Agents of the Spanish National Police, in a joint operation with the Civil Guard and the Customs Surveillance Service of the Tax Agency, and with the collaboration of the Peruvian authorities, have seized more than 66 kilos of cocaine that were going to be introduced into Spain hidden inside industrial machinery.
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The operation -framed within the plan to fight drug trafficking in the Campo de Gibraltar- has been carried out in Algeciras (Cádiz), Barcelona and Almería, and has ended with the arrest of 8 people in Sabadell (6), Barcelona (1) and El Ejido (1).
The modus operandi used by the organization consisted of buying industrial machines in Peru, where several people with mechanical knowledge enabled them to have hidden compartments to hide the drug, and later send them to Spain by sea.
The investigation began, thanks to international police cooperation, when the Peruvian authorities informed the agents of the existence of a criminal organization that would be based in Peru and Spain. The information provided referred to an organization specializing in the export of large amounts of cocaine hidden inside large-tonnage rolling machines, through maritime containers.
Police investigations found that the investigated criminal group bought industrial machinery in Peru to transfer it to warehouses where several people, with mechanical knowledge, enabled hidden compartments inside in order to hide the narcotic substance and make it difficult for the authorities to locate it. police.
After the concealment of the drug, the machines were exported, in containers, by sea to Spain.
At the beginning of April, the agents detected the arrival, at the port of Algeciras, of a container suspected of hiding a significant amount of cocaine inside industrial machinery. The investigators verified that said container carried four heavy-duty rolling machines and, after exhaustively inspecting them, discovered that they had been subtly modified in the base area and re-welded with a steel sheet.
A few days later, the container left Algeciras aboard a ship for the port of Valencia, where it remained for several days without moving in order to prevent it from being linked to the container that was transporting the drug.
Finally, in the middle of last May, the agents detected how the container left Valencia aboard a truck to go to Barcelona, specifically to an apparently abandoned farm located in the municipality of Sabadell. There they observed several individuals who, using a forklift, lowered the four rolling machines and introduced them inside a warehouse where they began to manipulate them.
Thanks to a joint device of the National Police, the Civil Guard and the Customs Surveillance Service of the Tax Agency, the members of the organization were surprised when they began the process of extracting the cocaine.
For this reason, the agents arrested the six people who were there and seized 61 cocaine pills -located by dismantling the steel sheets from the base of the machines- that yielded an approximate weight of 66 kilos of narcotic.
The investigators continued the investigations to identify and locate the people who were behind the importation of the merchandise and who had faced the expenses and documentary procedures of the same.
In this sense, last September the agents arrested two other people related to the events investigated in Barcelona and El Ejido (Almería). Likewise, they carried out three records in Barcelona and the Almeria municipalities of El Ejido and Roquetas de Mar.
This method of concealing cocaine in industrial machinery has been used on other occasions to try to introduce drugs into our country. In fact, this same year, two other operations have been carried out, without links to this one, in which the drug concealment system was similar.
In one of them, 620 kilos of cocaine hidden in a 12-ton rotor were seized in the port of Barcelona, and in the other, 464 kilos of cocaine hidden in an eleven-ton grinding machine were discovered. In both cases, the use of heavy industrial machinery was necessary to extract the drug. ■