Charlie Smith
ON Saturday at 9pm Hamza Ziani was assassinated while he ate sushi and sipped a beer with a girl in Torremolinos’ Tiki restaurant.
As the waitress brought the food to the table, a lone gunman entered the restaurant and fired nine shots, catching his victim four times in the head and chest.
Ziani died in the Regional Hospital of Malaga hours later, while his masked killer escaped with at least one accomplice in a stolen white van, which they used to evade police on the motorway.
A Dutchman of Maghrebi origin, Ziani, 33, was immediately identified by authorities upon his assassination, who recognised him as an international narco who they had arrested just a month previous, for making a bomb in Marbella.
Spain’s bomb disposal experts, Tedax, carried out a controlled explosion of the device in Marbella on September, which was found on a construction site.
The dead Dutchman was in a conflict with the Netherlands most wanted criminal Ridouan Taghi, who has ordered around 20 deaths to protect his €100 million cocaine empire and the killing of Ziani is believed to be the latest round of score settling on the Costa del Sol.
The Dutch are one of the principal mafias on the Costa del Sol, controlling a large portion of the cocaine business, in a year that has seen gang warfare reach new heights.
The month of October began with the Estepona shooting of another drug smuggler, whose body was dumped in Algeciras and last week police recorded a six-tonne cocaine haul in Malaga concealed in bananas.
