German police action in European cocaine record investigation

German police action in European cocaine record investigation

Early Wednesday morning raids and arrests were made in Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium in a large German investigation into the discovery of 16,174 kilos of cocaine in the port of Hamburg and 7.2 tons in Antwerp. Most of the raids were in northern Germany, especially in and around the city of Hanover.

The investigation is led by the Landdeskriminalamt Lower Saxony (LKA), the Customs Criminal Investigation Department of Hanover (ZFA) and the Public Prosecution Service in Hanover. There were raids on 35 properties in the states of Lower Saxony, Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia.

Paraguay

Eleven people have been arrested so far. There were raids on Celle, Walsrode, Visselhövede, Liebenburg, Sarstedt, Wolfsburg, Meinersen and Achim. There were also searches in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Paraguay. One of the German suspects is a member of a motorcycle club, according to German broadcaster NDR.

The record amount of cocaine was found on February 12, 2021 in a shipment of filler cans. But according to the LKA, the investigation into the network was already underway.

Import company

According to broadcaster NDR, the cocaine was seized in Hamburg in 2021 after a tip from Dutch authorities. This concerned five containers from an import company from Rotterdam, which they had brought to Hamburg from Paraguay. After the cocaine was found, the Rotterdam company was raided, after which it turned out that the company had also sent a shipment to Antwerp, after which the 7.2 tons were seized.

cover

In the Netherlands there is now a lawsuit against the manager of the import company Shipment Solutions in Bleskensgraaf: the 29-year-old Vlaardingen Atif S.. He was sentenced in December by the court in Rotterdam to 4.4 years in prison, a much lower sentence than the ten years demanded by the Public Prosecution Service. S. was only convicted for preparatory acts, not for the smuggling itself. S. was the only suspect.

Shipment Solutions was a pure cover for an address, and had no further business activities.

In June last year, Atif S. claimed that the justice system had invited him to go into a witness protection program if he was going to testify about others, which he had refused.

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