Alex Trelinski
A GANG selling weapons of war to drug crews around Spain has been brought down by the Guardia Civil.
The military-style guns were supplied to traffickers to help them ‘protect’ marijuana farms and warehouses.
18 people have been arrested including members of the notorious ‘Los Pulleros’ clan based in the Murcia region town of Alguazas.
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The group had members who had licenses to buy guns and who falsely reported thefts of weapons.
Some of the gang had previous arrests to their name related to arms and drug trafficking in addition to attempted murder.
16 searches were conducted in Murcia as well as in Alicante and Cadiz provinces.
The crew was also linked to a Granada-based arms trafficking group which, as previously reported by the Olive Press, was broken up by the Guardia Civil earlier this year.
The two gangs cooperated with each other to meet the demands of narcotic dealers who wanted specific weapons.
Among the items seized during the Murcia operation were assault rifles such as the AK47, police shotguns and state-of-the-art pistols.
897 cartridges of different calibres were also seized – 249 of them considered war cartridges – in addition to a silencer, magazines and a sub-machine gun.
A by-product of the Guardia investigation was the dismantling of five indoor marijuana farms.
They all deployed high-end security cameras to watch over employees and monitor any possible moves by police.
Raids on the farms yielded over €173,000 in cash, 1,733 marijuana plants, and five high-end vehicles.
Not satisfied with gun-running and drug trafficking, the criminal organisation also extorted people who took out loans at massively high interest rates.
Victims were coerced to settle their debts with cash payments or by handing over goods.
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