• The seizure, carried out on June 23, was the largest cocaine seizure ever made in Alicante, with 4,318 kilos of 87% purity.

• The drug, which was hidden in a shipment of bananas, is believed to have reached a value of more than 265 million euros on the illicit market.

July 21, 2023.- Five members of a criminal organization dedicated to drug trafficking have been imprisoned after the intervention, on June 23, of more than four tons of cocaine in a warehouse in Alicante, within the framework of a joint operation carried out by Customs Surveillance officials of the Tax Agency and agents of the National Police. This is the largest cocaine haul ever recorded in the province of Alicante.

At the beginning of June this year and thanks to the bilateral diplomatic relations that the Spanish state maintains with other countries, information was received from the Interior Attaché of the Spanish Embassy in the countries of Bulgaria, Ukraine, Albania, North Macedonia and Cyprus in which they warned of the establishment in the province of Alicante of an important criminal organization formed by citizens of Albanian origin that would be dedicated to the introduction and trafficking of cocaine in large quantities.

From that moment on, the investigation into the criminal network began, with the main objective being to identify and determine its members, their habits and the locations where they operated.

Research efforts on the organization

Officials in charge of the investigation began a series of inquiries and investigations to find out who was part of this criminal organisation, being able to identify more than five people of Albanian origin who were suspiciously preparing and equipping a warehouse in the Llano del Espartal Industrial Estate in Alicante. Members of the organization were seen moving machinery necessary for unloading trucks into the warehouse. In addition, they adopted extreme vigilance measures, traveled frequently abroad and had several addresses that they alternated in order to confuse the police. During the course of the investigation, the leader of the plot was identified and a visibly marked and differentiated hierarchy and distribution of tasks was observed.

Both the ship and the vehicles used by the members of the criminal organization are said to be registered in the name of apparently legal companies in order to go unnoticed, hinder police investigations and give a semblance of legality to the money obtained from the sale of drugs. More specifically, they would use a vehicle sales company that would be in the name of one of the detainees of Spanish origin. Investigators attribute to this person, also arrested, a previous role as a possible front man for other criminal organisations in the Levante area, including links to front companies for the rental of ships and vehicles.

Operational phase

On June 23, officers from the Combined Customs Surveillance Unit of Malaga and agents from the National Police detected in the port of this city a shipment of several containers coming from Ecuador, which in addition to containing the legally declared bananas, could hide some type of narcotic substance and that two of them were destined for the city of Alicante, so in close collaboration with the National Police units in the city of Alicante and with the due judicial authorization, a discreet surveillance of said shipment was carried out, which would travel in two trucks from Malaga to Alicante.

Investigators confirmed that the cargo ended up hours later in a warehouse located in the Llano del Espartal industrial estate in Alicante, which had been investigated days earlier and where police units were already located. There they were able to observe how members of the criminal organisation unloaded the containers disguised in reflective work clothes, thus giving the image of legal and regular workers in the area.

At that time, investigators decided to inspect the cargo of both trucks, discovering that, in addition to the bananas declared at customs, the vehicles were hiding almost 400 packages of cocaine with a total gross weight of more than 4,800 kilos, with the net weight of the drug being 4,318 kilos. The four men of Albanian origin, aged between 28 and 40, were therefore arrested for the crimes of belonging to a Criminal Organisation and Against Public Health for trafficking in substances that cause serious harm to health. The analyses carried out by the Health Department on the drug revealed that it had a very high purity, reaching 87%.

It was later that the 68-year-old Spanish member of the organization who acted as a front man for the organization was located and arrested.

Some of those arrested already had police records for similar offences and two of them were in an irregular situation in Spain.

Three house searches were also carried out in Alicante and Elche, where a large amount of documentation, nearly 6,000 euros in cash and four high-end vehicles were seized.

This is an operation that has prioritized coordination and work between officials of the Combined Customs Surveillance Unit of Malaga and the Drugs and Organized Crime Unit of the Provincial Police Stations of Alicante and Malaga, Special Response Group 1 against Organized Crime Levante, where the imprisonment of a large part of the members of this criminal organization based in the Spanish east coast has been achieved and the dismantling of one of the most active criminal organizations in terms of drug trafficking.

The detainees were placed at the disposal of the Alicante Court of Instruction on duty while the operation is still ongoing and new arrests are not ruled out in the coming days.