A Chrysler Voyager, parked in a garage of the town of Pueblo El Jardín (in Benalmádena, Malaga), hid a dangerous secret in a double bottom: several sport bag FN detonator gun, four hand grenades, cartridges, loaders and silencers. An entire arsenal, in the hands of members of a network of drug traffickers dedicated to the introduction of cocaine in Spain, sentenced to jail this week by the National Court.
The court has imposed sentences, between six and almost twelve years in prison, 15 members and collaborators of this “criminal organization”, who had specialized in putting the merchandise in the country camouflaged between fruit imported from America, as well as in the manufacture and sale of synthetic drugs. In fact, in October 2018, the researchers intervened more than 4.8 tons of cocaine in a Malaga ship, whose market value would have exceeded 900 million euros, according to the National Court Judgment.
The magistrates have decreed the highest sentences (almost 12 years of seclusion) for the two leaders of the band, Marco Conrnelius Huijsman and Hans Leender Martinus Verheij, born in the Netherlands. Most condemned are Dutch, but there is also an Estonian, a Spaniard, a Costa Rican and an Australian. The cocaine, which imported from Costa Rica, introduced it into the peninsula through the port of Setúbal (Portugal), from where they moved it to Malaga to later distribute it to third parties.
On the other hand, for the manufacture of synthetic drugs, they used products that imported from China, which stored to generate MDMA and MDA. “To develop all this activity, the organization had a corporate network, vehicles, industrial ships, housing, premises and garages,” the judicial resolution rises, dated July 31.
The sentence highlights the “great criminal capacity of the organization”: “given the diversity of narcotic substances whose traffic and manufacture was dedicated, and in very high quantities, as well as the numerous material media with which it had.” The agents pointed out that even several of them maintained contact with the historic Galician narco José Ramón Prado Bugallo, aka Sito Miñanco. The judges also delve that the business “was very lucrative”, as demonstrated by the “living conditions” of the drug traffickers, “who enjoyed homes, luxury vehicles and watches and jewels of high price.”
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