Walter Finch
SPANISH police have smashed a huge criminal gang that had turned the Gulf of Cadiz into one of Europe’s epicentres for drug trafficking.
The group trafficked tonnes of hashish from Morocco into Spain using rivers in Cadiz and Huelva to bring it inland.
The operation was headed up by the infamous narco kingpin Carmelo Lapela, who managed to escape capture and is currently on the run from justice.
The group used notorious high-powered narco speedboats to ferry bales of hashish to Spain, where they would be unloaded along the banks of the Guadalquivir river in Cadiz and the Guadiana in Huelva.
From there they were rushed to local storage warehouses in various towns and villages in the area, including the picturesque Sanlúcar de Barrameda near Cadiz and Ayamonte in Huelva.
The group maintained extensive networks and hideouts in the region allowing them to mix up their routes and throw police off their tails.
Once unloaded, the drugs would only stay in that location for a few hours before being divided up and loaded onto trucks to be moved on to Coin and other inland locations in Malaga.
From here the drugs would await collection by long distance haulage lorries for distribution to other European countries.
The gang ran a sophisticated, high-level operation that included various tricks and methods for disguising their wares.
Police revealed that the storage house in Sanlúcar de Barrameda was hidden in a rural plot of land that appeared to only contain an underground water tank accessed through a hatch.
However, the narcos had fitted a hidden switch that activated a hydraulic mechanism, moving the water tank to reveal an underground bunker where the gang stored the drugs.
Investigators from the Guardia Civil in Algeciras got wind of the narcos in August last year and began to covertly surveil them to understand their logistics and distribution in an operation called ‘Truck’.
By July of this year, they had tracked down one of the gang’s key distribution nodes in Coin outside of Malaga.
On one occasion, on July 11, they tracked a vehicle moving drugs to the warehouse when they were astonished to see a car full of men dressed in the uniforms of the Policia Nacional intercept it.
The men appeared to carry out a stop and seizure, carrying off nearly half a tonne of hashish and loading it into their BMW.
But the Guardia Civil officers quickly realised that this was a drug heist being carried out by another gang using fake uniforms.
When the Guardia Civil intervened, a high speed car chase through the town ensued, until the criminals ploughed into a stationary truck in broad daylight with the bales of hash clearly visible to bystanders.
The driver of the car scrambled out onto the street and then pulled out a gun and started firing at the Guardia Civil officers who were closing in.
The police returned warning shots before the stick-up hijacker eventually gave himself up.
The investigation culminated in the arrest of 29 individuals and the seizure of 8,946 kilos of hashish, along with smaller quantities of marijuana and firearms.
Several vehicles, including a lorry preparing to take drugs to France, were also confiscated.
