THE Netherlands has begun experiencing low-level armed conflict reminiscent of Mexico’s cartel wars after a shipment of cocaine was reportedly stolen in Spain.
Some 30 armed men, several carrying Kalashnikovs, descended on a farmhouse in the Dutch village of Overasselt in the early hours of Tuesday as part of a feud over a missing cocaine shipment.
A video purportedly filmed just hours beforehand shows four masked, armed men warning a man named as ‘Jan G’ that he stole cocaine belonging to ‘our Belgian friend in Spain.’
It is suspected that the alleged missing shipment is connected to mocromafia boss Jos Leijdekkers, also known as ‘Bolle Jos’ (‘chubby Jos’), who is thought to be the mastermind behind the record 30-tonne cocaine haul seized earlier this year.
The man in the video doing the talking, speaking in halting English with a Spanish accent, says that a shipment of 1,283 kilos ‘never left Spain’.
He then gives Jan 12 hours to return the drugs, ending the recording with a warning that they will ‘kill everyone, all you love.’
Not long after, the assault on Jan’s home in Overasselt began.
The Olive Press is unable to corroborate the missing cocaine, but Spain, along with Holland and Belgium, is one of the principal entry points for the drugs into Europe, which are increasingly delivered via fast boats to Spanish beaches.
CCTV footage of the attack shows the armed group walking up a country path to a car sitting with one headlight on.
There’s a muzzle flash from an assault rifle at near point blank range, then all the men are seen to scatter.
A 51-year-old security guard, named locally as Berry, was shot dead as he was sitting in his car outside the property, only three days into the job.
The group then turned their weapons on two police officers who arrived at the scene, shooting and wounding both of them.
Jan managed to flee out the back of the house carrying a small child, according to local reports.
A huge police operation arrested 34 people throughout the day, then a 35th Wednesday, among them Dutch, Belgian, French and Algerian nationals, showcasing the international nature of the modern cocaine trafficking cartels.
Jan, 28, has a previous conviction for running an MDMA laboratory and is alleged to have handled drug transport work for Jos Leijdekkers, the fugitive Dutch trafficker and mocromafia leader.
Jan’s photo had already been circulating among criminals in the days before the raid, attached to a message asking who he was and what he knew about a missing drug shipment, according to newspaper AD.
Leijdekkers, who is believed to be hiding in Sierra Leone, denies any involvement in the Overasselt attack, with his lawyers, telling Dutch news agency ANP that the allegations against him were ‘dangerous and not in accordance with the rule of law.’
But an investigation by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime concluded Leijdekkers’ own network almost certainly coordinated by a separate, far larger shipment.
Spain’s Guardia Civil seized more than 30 tonnes of cocaine found aboard the cargo ship Arconian off Western Sahara, near the Canary Islands last May – the largest cocaine seizure in European history.
Dutch Justice Minister David van Weel called the recent violence unprecedented, telling local media: ‘The fact that you have hordes of dozens of young people walking through the streets of a village and immediately opening fire on the police is unprecedented.’
He declined to call the Netherlands a ‘narco state,’ but said groups such as those built by notorious crime bosses Ridouan Taghi and Leijdekkers had ensured that ‘rooted, organised crime is present in the Netherlands’, benefiting from the country’s logistics and financial infrastructure.
‘They are drug cartels, the mafia. They operate beyond our borders,’ he said, stopping short of naming who was behind Tuesday’s attack.
Leijdekkers alone faces a combined 81 years in prison across separate convictions in the Netherlands and Belgium.
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