Belgian cops have seized €1.8 billion worth of cocaine in just six weeks — after boffins cracked another messaging network used by thousands of criminals.
Officers revealed they intercepted the 27.6 tonnes of cocaine in the port of Antwerp in a number of seizures since February.
That included the seizure of 11 tonnes of the drug at the start of this month.
Police revealed they made the seizures after experts cracked an encrypted mobile phone system called Sky ECC, that showed details of the planned shipments.
That system had up to 70,000 subscribers — many of them gangsters.
Belgian authorities have seized almost 18 tonnes of cocaine, with an estimated street value of €1.8 billionA Belgian Police spokesman said: “During a judicial investigation into a potential service criminal organisation suspected of knowingly providing encrypted telephones to the criminal environment, police specialists managed to crack the encrypted messages from Sky ECC.
“This data provides elements in current files, but also opened up new criminal offences. The international smuggling of cocaine batches plays a prominent role in intercepted reports.”
It’s the second time in a year that law enforcement in Europe has cracked an encrypted messaging system.
French and Dutch experts broke the supposedly secure Encrochat system, also widely used by criminals. That has led to hundreds of suspects being arrested all over Europe — and crime groups dismantled.
The system was broken last year and information was passed to police all over Europe, including gardai, from last March.
Sources said gardai have already used information from the messages to seize cash, drugs and guns, as well as arrest suspects — and more operations are planned.
The Irish messages form just a fraction of the estimated 20 million texts captured by Dutch, French and the EU’s Europol investigators when they cracked the security barrier in the Encrochat encrypted messaging system — and laid bare the secrets of criminals all over Europe.
Gangsters had been using the special phones — that cost €3,000 each — to send each other texts they believed were secure from the prying eyes of cops.
The criminals had so much faith in Encrochat they swapped hundreds of millions of messages since 2017 — including orders to carry out hits, details of drugs shipments, and information on weapons storage.
But cops legally hacked the system — and managed to read and record messages without anyone realising.
Police capitalised on the breaking of an encrypted communications network popular with criminalsIn Antwerp, 1,600 police officers and balaclava-wearing special forces, complete with arms and battering rams, were ordered into action.
More than 200 addresses were raided in what was the largest police operation ever conducted in the country.
A particularly savage twist was revealed with the discovery of a makeshift prison built out of seven shipping containers, with the last fitted out as a torture chamber in the village of Wouwse Plante, 50kms outside Antwerp.
There are hopes that Operation Sky will herald the downfall of a generation of local bosses, although the Belgian and Dutch “godfathers” now hide out in Dubai and Turkey in a bid to escape from the authorities.
Nearly 28 tonnes of cocaine was seized in container ships and houses, worth around €1.4bn, and many arrests were made.
Blow
The raids were hailed as a mighty blow against what Belgian federal prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw calls “a world where morality has totally disappeared”.
But the operation also highlighted the fact that Europe has eclipsed the US as the Columbian cartels’ favoured market.
