SPANISH police have put the brakes on the Costa del Sol’s spiralling mafia activity with a huge operation targeting a number of interconnecting mafia gangs that formed a French-led ‘super mafia’.
A series of armed raids across homes and properties in dozens of towns running from Estepona and Marbella through Mijas to the capital itself, as well as inland, has seen 55 arrested in the past month.
The police kicked down doors far beyond the coast, stretching inland to Ronda, Antequera, Alhaurín el Grande and Cártama, where stash houses and safe properties were uncovered, and even north to Jaén and Barcelona.
Most of those arrested were French nationals, though police say the network also drew in Moroccan and Eastern European associates as drivers, couriers and enforcers.
The gangs used the coast’s villas, warehouses and quiet residential estates as logistics hubs, blending in among expats and tourists while moving drugs north to France and northern Europe.
What began as nine separate investigations soon converged when detectives realised the same names, vehicles and stash houses were surfacing again and again.
A kidnap gang in Marbella turned out to be connected to gunmen in Benalmádena, while the weapons seized in Estepona matched those used in a daylight shooting in Malaga city.
READ MORE: Man suspected of gunning down two gangsters in Costa del Sol bar to be extradited to Spain
As the cases overlapped, a pattern emerged – a web of French-run crews moving drugs, weapons and hitmen along the Costa del Sol’s criminal corridor.
In Marbella, a Moroccan man was snatched outside a restaurant in October 2024 and held for several days before being freed in Torre de Benagalbón, near Rincon de la Victoria.
Two months later, the same network tried to assassinate two Swedish men in Benalmadena, spraying their ride-hail car with bullets from a submachine gun and pistol.
The victims survived by leaping 30 metres down a slope before firefighters pulled them to safety.
A raid in Estepona then exposed a cache of 21 firearms, including assault rifles and pistols, hidden in a luxury home.
Another crew within the same organisation staged a daylight ambush in the car park of a Lidl supermarket on Calle Gerona in Malaga city, shooting a man twice during a failed cash robbery.
In Estepona, officers seized 14 more weapons – three of them assault rifles – used in violent ‘stick-ups’, armed robberies of rival traffickers across the province.
Inland in Antequera, a truck loaded with 374 kilos of hashish was intercepted on its way to Madrid after leaving an industrial warehouse registered under a false name.
The towns of Alhaurin el Grande and Cartama, just outside Malaga, were the scenes of seizures of more than three tonnes of hash hidden in luxury vehicles, arresting one suspect wanted in France for homicide.
In Malaga’s Bailen-Miraflores and Campanillas districts, agents unearthed two underground bunkers filled with 170 kilos of cocaine and arrested the ringleader in Ronda.
Linked raids in El Saucejo and Marbella dismantled another cell that ferried assault weapons in small cars fitted with secret compartments.
And in Barcelona, officers seized 1.68 tonnes of hash hidden among textile bales prepared for export to northern Europe.
Together, the evidence revealed a single criminal super-structure – a French-led ‘super-cartel’ whose overlapping cells shared safe houses, armouries and smugglers from one end of the coast to the other.
Javier Salas, the government’s subdelegate for Malaga, called the operations ‘the most accurate and forceful blow against organised crime in our province in recent times’.
Malaga Police Commissioner Roberto Rodríguez Velasco added: “We will not give in. We will not allow those who disturb peaceful coexistence to get away with it.
“We are facing dangerous people. They will be identified and brought before the judicial authority, whatever it costs us.”
However, he admitted that ‘there is still a long way to go’ in smashing the vice-like grip that organised crime has taken on the Costa del Sol in recent years.
The police commissioner was standing before the haul of 37 firearms including assault rifles, submachine guns and pistols during a press conference at the provincial police station.
Across the nine separate police operations they seized almost nine tonnes of drugs made up of hash and cocaine, €150,000 in cash, and 40 vehicles.
Investigators say this organisation functioned as a federation of overlapping crews that cooperated when needed, pooling weapons, vehicles and intelligence to control drug routes from the Campo de Gibraltar to northern Europe.
Police sources believe this model allowed the gangs to evade detection for years, blending the structures of organised crime with the mobility of freelance hitmen.
It was this network – the so-called French ‘super-mafia’ – that the latest wave of raids was designed to dismantle once and for all.
The raids formed part of Spain’s national ‘Plan Costa del Sol’, a year-old strategy to dismantle foreign-led mafias operating along the southern coast.
In the past year alone, more than 600 arrests, 70 tonnes of hashish, 5.2 tonnes of cocaine and 170 weapons have been seized under the plan.
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