Members of a criminal organization that imported narcotics from South America through European ports and airports arrested
The provincial command of Reggio Calabria of the Guardia di Finanza and officials from the local office of the Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli seized another large shipment of narcotics in the port of Gioia Tauro, identifying a container from Canada carrying timber intended for importation, inside which a batch of marijuana weighing a total of 1,220 kilograms was discovered. The Guardia di Finanza specified that the seized drug batch, once introduced to the market, could have yielded criminal organizations approximately €1.8 million. Since the beginning of this year, nearly 2.74 tons of cocaine have been seized in the Calabrian port so far.
Meanwhile, today, officers from the central I.C.O. service and the provincial command of the Guardia di Finanza of Catanzaro executed an order issued by the GIP of the Tribunal of Catanzaro at the request of the local Procura della Repubblica, which ordered the preventive detention of nine individuals accused of variously promoting, directing, financing, organizing, and carrying out an intense international narcotics trafficking operation from South America. One of the accusations is that they organized trafficking from South American territory, primarily from Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, for the importation of cocaine into Europe, concealed inside containers loaded onto merchant ships bound for Northern European ports (mainly Rotterdam, Hamburg, and Antwerp) and national ports (Gioia Tauro, Livorno, Civitavecchia, Genoa, and Trieste), where members of the association would take action, organizing teams to extract the drugs from the port area. Additionally, the organization allegedly imported cocaine by air through the Frankfurt hub and by shipping liquid cocaine hidden inside moringa juice via courier, concealing the narcotics by soaking the cardboard boxes containing fruit imported from Colombia.
