Latin American cocaine cartels bring violence to Europe

Latin American cocaine cartels bring violence to Europe
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In this file photo taken on January 7, 2022, Belgian customs officers search for drugs in a container at the port in Antwerp. (Photo by François Walschaerts / AFP)
Latin American cocaine cartels bring violence to Europe
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A Belgian officer checks a box of bananas during a customs control for drugs in the hangar of a fruit company at the port in Antwerp. (Valeria Mongelli / AFP)
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Updated 16 January 2023

Latin American cocaine cartels bring violence to Europe

Latin American cocaine cartels bring violence to Europe

PARIS: “Seventy euros for one, 120 for two,” said the cocaine dealer as the young woman opened her door on Paris’ chic Left Bank.
“I’m like all the delivery riders speeding around Paris dropping off sushi and groceries,” he smiled. “I get orders and I deliver them.”
Getting cocaine in many of Europe’s big cities is now as easy as ordering a pizza.
Twenty or so minutes after you place your order by WhatsApp or Signal, a dealer can be at your door.
“Consumers prefer to go on a platform and have their drugs delivered by a guy who looks like a Deliveroo rider,” said police commissioner Virginie Lahaye, the head of the Paris drugs squad. “It is much easier than having to go to some grim place in the suburbs.”
Some 3.5 million Europeans took cocaine in 2021, according to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) — four times more than 20 years ago.
The continent has been hit by a “tsunami” of cocaine, said the head of the Belgian federal police, Eric Snoeck, with 240 tons seized in 2021, according to Europol, nearly five times more than a decade ago.

Lucrative market
Europe has become one of the most lucrative markets for the big drug cartels, who have not hesitated about using the corruption and extreme violence that has served them so well in South America.
“Kidnappings, torture and hits: there is so much money at stake that the criminal organizations have brought the cartels’ methods to our shores,” said Stephanie Cherbonnier of the French anti-drug office.
Northern Europe’s big ports like Antwerp and Rotterdam have been so riven by drug violence that democracy itself has been threatened, with gangs even daring to plot to kidnap Belgium’s justice minister.
With gunbattles in the streets of Antwerp, the country could soon “be regarded as a narco state” warned Brussels’ chief prosecutor Johan Delmulle.
The cocaine flooding Europe begins its journey in the high mountain plateaus of Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, where the coca leaves from which the drug is extracted are grown.
In Catatumbo in northeast Colombia, Jose del Carmen Abril relies on coca to feed his eight children.
“Coca... has replaced the government which was never very present here,” said the 53-year-old. “It has helped us build schools, health centers, roads and houses.”

In a country where many earn no more than $7 (6.5 euros) a day, a coca grower can earn five times that.
But Del Carmen Abril chafes at being called a “narco,” saying farmers like him “don’t even make the minimum wage.”
Despite the billions spent over the decades by Washington and Bogota in their “war on drugs,” peasants continue to grow more and more coca, with harvests up 14 percent in 2021 to an all-time high of 1,400 tons, according to the United Nations.
“Chemists” mix the chopped leaves with petrol, lime, cement and ammonium sulphate to make a white paste that is then turned into powder in the drug laboratories.
In Catatumbo the paste sells for $370 a kilo. Once mixed with a cocktail of acids and solvents it becomes “coke,” worth more than $1,000 a kilo.

Mexican cartels
Colombia supplies two-thirds of the world’s cocaine. But the fall of the Cali and Medellin cartels in the 1990s, and the peace deal signed in 2016 with the Marxist FARC guerrillas, turned the trade upside down.
Once mere middlemen, the Mexican cartels have since taken almost total control of the market, from financing production to supervising cocaine smuggling.
The Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels at first concentrated on their “natural” market, the United States, before switching their focus to Europe, where cocaine consumption has exploded.
Europol estimates that Europe’s cocaine market is now worth between 7.6 and 10.5 billion euros at street level.
“The US market is saturated and coke sells in Europe at prices 50 to 100 percent higher,” said the head of French customs’ intelligence unit, Florian Colas. “Another advantage for the traffickers is the less dissuasive prison sentences and the multiple logistic options.”

Most of the cocaine that crosses the Atlantic is carried in containers, hidden in perfectly legal shipments of bananas, sugar or tinned food.
The rest comes in by air hidden in suitcases or in the stomachs of drug “mules.” Some even comes by sea in remote-controlled submersibles, like the ones seized by Spanish police in July.
The Mexican cartels established their European bridgehead on Spain’s Costa del Sol in the early 2000s, which was already the main hub for the transport of Moroccan cannabis.
But the arrest of several major smugglers and above all the explosion in maritime traffic, persuaded them to redirect smuggling through northern Europe’s giant container ports like Antwerp, Hamburg, Le Havre and Rotterdam.
“Some cargos go through Caribbean ports” on their way from South America, while others “pass via the Balkans or West Africa before entering Europe,” said Corinne Cleostrate, deputy head of French customs.

Enormous profits
The traffickers follow a well-trodden “business plan,” with Mexican cartels selling to European multinational crime syndicates, sometimes via fixers who divide up the cargos to spread the costs and risks.
Some of the “crime groups (who are part of these deals) can be competitors,” said Cherbonnier.
“But they also create alliances to pool their strengths and their know-hows to get the drugs in.”
The Moroccan “Mocro maffia” in Belgium and the Netherlands, Albanian, Serb or Kosovan mafia and the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta divide up the market according to their territories and specialities.
But they pilot drugs through the ports using local criminals, with a strict division of roles.
A kilo of cocaine bought for $1,000 in South America can be sold for 35,000 euros ($37,600) in Europe. Once out of the port and cut with other substances, it will then be sold on to customers for 70 euros a gram, its value having gone up close to 100-fold by the time it hits the street.
Such enormous profits allow a huge war chest to buy off dockers, cargo agents, truckers, and sometimes customs and police officers, to get cocaine out of the ports.
Several French dockers have been jailed for working with drug gangs in Le Havre, with police saying some have been forced into helping the traffickers.
One described to his lawyer how he was sucked in. “Before I used to make 200 or 300 euros a month from selling (stolen) perfume or cartons of cigarettes. One day some guys asked me to take some bags out (of the port) for 1,000 euros a bag,” he said.
The gangs are willing to pay up to 100,000 euros to get a container out of Le Havre, where “we are only able to check one percent of the containers because we haven’t the resources to do any more,” a customs officer admitted.
Some dock workers are paid to authorize the exit of containers or move ones full of drugs out of range of security cameras. Others loan their security badges to the gangs.
In Rotterdam, Europe’s biggest port, police and customers officers surprised a group of the traffickers’ local foot soldiers holed up in a “container hotel” with food and bedding waiting for the arrival of a shipment of cocaine.




In this file photograph taken on November 7, 2022, a French customs officer tests a package suspected to be cocaine at Orly Airport, south of Paris. (AFP)

Royals targeted
As well as buying complicity and silence, the huge sums to be made have fueled extreme violence in northern Europe’s port cities.
Antwerp — the main gateway of illegal drugs into Europe — has recorded more than 200 drug-linked violent incidents in the last five years, with an 11-year-old girl killed last week after bullets were fired into a house in the Merksem residential district.
In May the home of a family known to be involved in drugs in nearby Deurne was bombed while their neighbors were celebrating a marriage in their garden.
In the Netherlands, the gangs have gone even further.
On July 6, 2021, the celebrated investigative journalist Peter R. de Vries was shot several times in an underground car park moments after appearing on a television talk show. He died nine days later.
A crime specialist, one of his sources was the main witness against drug baron Ridouan Taghi, the suspected head of the “Mocro maffia” arrested in Dubai in 2019.
“We have gone to another level of violence entirely,” said Belgian police chief Snoeck. “They have no qualms about torturing someone for information or simply executing someone who has not kept to a contract... it sends shivers down your spine.”
In 2020, Dutch police discovered containers converted into a cell and torture chamber, and last year the cracking of the encrypted Sky ECC secure messaging app used by the gangs gave a further insight into their ruthlessness, with people put through meat grinders or executed live on video.
The cocaine mafia will do anything to protect their business. And no one is safe. Belgian police uncovered a plot to kidnap the country’s justice minister in September, and in the Netherlands Crown Princess Amalia and Prime Minister Mark Rutte were said to have been targeted late last year.

Only a tenth seized

But the authorities have been hitting back hard with better port security, intelligence cooperation and “targeting” of the top dogs that have led to record seizures, with 109.9 tons of cocaine intercepted in Antwerp last year.
“It shows our methods are now more efficient but also that the flow of drugs is increasing,” admitted French customs chief Cleostrate.
As a rule of thumb, experts suspect only a tenth of the cocaine shipped to Europe is ever seized.
But Ger Scheringa, who heads Dutch customs investigations in Rotterdam, said more and more “automization of cargo terminals is making it difficult” for traffickers.
They are already switching shipments to smaller, less guarded ports like Montoir-de-Bretagne in northwestern France, however, where more than 600 kilos of “coke” was seized in 2022.
Europe police forces have also had major successes, claiming to have decapitated the “super cartel” responsible for smuggling a third of the continent’s cocaine, with 49 suspects held in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and most of all, Dubai, one of the drug lords’ favored haunts.
But on the front line in the Caribbean, French customs officers in Martinque monitoring vessels heading north from South America are far from complacent.
“The traffickers know our methods... we do our best but you have recognize that we cannot get them all,” admitted the island’s customs chief Jean-Charles Metivier. “We are often one step behind.”
Meanwhile in Paris, business and competition are brisk. “Flash sale!” declares a message sent out by a dealer on WhatsApp. “Fifty euros a gram.”


Staff at Sheffield Children’s Hospital heard laughing as 5-year-old died

Staff at Sheffield Children’s Hospital heard laughing as 5-year-old died
Updated 16 sec ago

Staff at Sheffield Children’s Hospital heard laughing as 5-year-old died

Staff at Sheffield Children’s Hospital heard laughing as 5-year-old died
  • Child’s father has filed a formal complaint against the hospital
  • Allegations also include standard of care his son received as patient

LONDON: The parents of 5-year-old Muhammad Ayaan, who passed away on March 15 in Sheffield Children’s Hospital, claim they heard medical staff laughing as their son’s life support machine was turned off.

Ayaan had a history of respiratory difficulties as well as a rare genetic condition that causes developmental delays, The Independent reported on Wednesday. He was admitted to the hospital on March 5 with breathing difficulties and died just over a week later. 

“When the machine was switched off at 2:30 a.m., we had a lot of family members there. There was laughter coming from staff members. We were so upset,” Ayaan’s father Haroon Rashid told The Independent.

“There was no one else on the ward apart from the staff and one other small child behind the curtain from us,” he added.

“Surely the staff knew Ayaan’s machine was about to be turned off. They continued laughing after my relative asked them to stop.

“A child’s life was coming to an end. It was highly insensitive. We are living with our son’s loss, but we are very, very angry about how the staff behaved.”

Ayaan’s mother Fakhra Dibi also described a similar incident when she was told that her son’s condition was deteriorating a few days before his death, The Independent reported.

Dibi claims she was given the news in a ward full of laughing staff, with children and other parents in the background.

“My wife rang me crying after the doctor broke the news,” Rashid said.

“They should have taken her to a private room, not told her like that in front of everyone. It’s hugely insensitive,” he added.

Rashid, a taxi driver and father of four, has filed a formal complaint, which also includes allegations about the standards of care during Ayaan’s time in the hospital as well as a claim that he was contacted for a follow-up appointment for his son 10 days after he died.

The 41-year-old further claims that hospital staff had been “dismissive” to some of the concerns he raised about his son during his care, The Independent reported.

“Every day in the treatment of my son, something went wrong. They didn’t listen to my years of experience in caring for my children,” he said.

“I’m not a doctor, but I know my son’s history. From past experience, I knew what treatment my son needed from the outset, but no one listened to me.”

However, Rashid emphasized the previous treatment that his son received as an outpatient from Sheffield Children’s Hospital had been faultless and that his consultants had supported the family throughout.

Rashid said: “We don’t know how we will live without him now our son is gone.

“We worry about what happened to him. We don’t want this to happen to any other child or any other family.

The hospital has promised a “thorough” investigation into the family’s claims.

Dr. Jeff Perring, medical director at Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, told The Independent: “I wish to express my deepest condolences to Ayaan’s family for their loss.

“The death of any child is tragic, and I know that my colleagues who treated, and came to know, Ayaan during his short life will share in expressing these condolences.

“The loss of a child while they are a patient at Sheffield Children’s is something we take very seriously.

“Our colleagues pride themselves on providing the best clinical and pastoral care for all children and young people who need it.

“We have received Rashid’s complaint, which is very detailed and complex.

“There will be a thorough internal investigation of the care and treatment Ayaan received at the hospital between 5 and 13 March, which will cover the concerns raised in Mr. Rashid’s complaint.”


Sweden finds woman guilty of war crimes for gruesome photos

Sweden finds woman guilty of war crimes for gruesome photos
Updated 31 min 15 sec ago

Sweden finds woman guilty of war crimes for gruesome photos

Sweden finds woman guilty of war crimes for gruesome photos
  • Fatosh Ibrahim who pleaded not guilty, was sentenced to three months in prison
  • The Goteborg District Court said Fatosh Ibrahim “on two occasions published photographs of severed heads impaled on the fence" of a Raqqa roundabout

COPENHAGEN: A Swedish court on Wednesday found a 35-year-old woman guilty of war crimes for posting photos of herself with severed heads that were on display in a Syrian city in 2014.
Fatosh Ibrahim who pleaded not guilty, was sentenced to three months in prison.
The Goteborg District Court said Fatosh Ibrahim “on two occasions published photographs of severed heads impaled on the fence” of a Raqqa roundabout, placed there by Daesh group militants.
Ibrahim used her cell phone to take photos of herself in Raqqa’s Naim Square — meaning “Paradise” — where Daesh group militants had displayed hanged bodies or heads.
The court said in its ruling that Ibrahim posted on Facebook “disparaging comments about the people in the photos and expressed that they deserved what they were subjected to.”
“The woman had clearly expressed her sympathy with the actions of the Daesh group, and her actions have been considered to be in connection with the armed conflict that was going on in the area at the time.”
Ibrahim told the court that she traveled to Syria in December 2012 and was forced to stay, claiming she didn’t travel to Syria to join the by Daesh group. She returned to Sweden in 2017, according to the verdict.
Ibrahim was also convicted of threatening and defaming social workers in Sweden.


Britain moves ahead with plan to house migrants in military bases

Migrants walk in Napier Barracks, a former military barracks being used to house asylum seekers in Folkestone, southeast England
Migrants walk in Napier Barracks, a former military barracks being used to house asylum seekers in Folkestone, southeast England
Updated 59 min 34 sec ago

Britain moves ahead with plan to house migrants in military bases

Migrants walk in Napier Barracks, a former military barracks being used to house asylum seekers in Folkestone, southeast England
  • Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made tackling the arrival of small boats one of his main priorities
  • Move to put migrants in military barracks has been criticized by rights groups for not providing adequate housing

LONDON: Britain’s government will set up basic accommodation at military bases for migrants who cross the English Channel in small boats, and is also looking at possibly housing them in vessels, immigration minister Robert Jenrick said on Wednesday.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made tackling the arrival of small boats one of his main priorities, hoping his move to get tough on illegal migration will win over voters before an election expected next year.
Addressing a backlash by some over the rising number of migrants being housed in hotels, Jenrick said the government was moving ahead with plans to “provide basic accommodation at scale” at military sites in southeast and east England.
“These will be scaled up over the coming months and will collectively provide accommodation to several thousands asylum seekers through repurposed barrack blocks and portacabins (portable cabins),” he told parliament.
The move to put migrants in military barracks has been criticized by rights groups for not providing adequate housing and even Britain’s foreign minister, James Cleverly, has raised concerns about using a base in his constituency.
Jenrick also said ministers were exploring the possibility of using “vessels” as accommodation, citing Scotland’s use of a chartered cruise ship docked to host Ukrainian families in Glasgow.
That drew criticism from the Scottish National Party which said boats were used there only a temporary measure.
Sunak’s Illegal Migration Bill to try to stop people traffickers from bringing migrants to Britain’s shores has been criticized by rights campaigners, with the Council of Europe saying it was at odds with London’s international obligations.
The Council of Europe’s experts on human trafficking also expressed “deep concern” over the plan at a meeting this week.


King Charles III makes world debut as tour starts in Germany

King Charles III makes world debut as tour starts in Germany
Updated 29 March 2023

King Charles III makes world debut as tour starts in Germany

King Charles III makes world debut as tour starts in Germany
  • Charles and Camilla, the queen consort, landed at Berlin's government airport in the early afternoon
  • His visit to Germany will give him an opportunity to highlight the causes he holds dear, like sustainability and the environment

BERLIN: King Charles III arrived in Berlin on Wednesday for his first foreign trip as Britain’s monarch, hoping to improve the UK’s relations with the European Union and to show that he can win hearts and minds abroad, just as his mother did for seven decades.
Charles and Camilla, the queen consort, landed at Berlin’s government airport in the early afternoon. The king, dressed in a black coat, and his wife, in a light blue coat and a feather-trimmed teal hat worn at a jaunty angle, paused at the top of their plane’s stairs to receive a 21-gun salute as two military jets performed a flyover.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was scheduled to welcome the royal couple with military honors at the German capital’s historic Brandenburg Gate.
Charles, 74, who ascended the throne after the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September, is set to be crowned on May 6. As Britain’s head of state, the king meets weekly with the prime minister and retains his mother’s role as leader of the Commonwealth.
He had initially planned to first visit France, but the first leg of his trip was canceled due to massive protests over planned pension changes there.
Billed as a multi-day tour of the European Union’s two biggest countries, the trip was designed to underscore British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s efforts to rebuild relations with the bloc after six years of arguments over Brexit and highlight the countries’ shared history as they work together to combat Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Now everything rests on Germany, where the king faces the first big test of whether he can be an effective conduit for the “soft power” the House of Windsor has traditionally wielded, helping Britain pursue its geopolitical goals through the glitz and glamor of a 1,000-year-old monarchy.
Charles, a former naval officer who is the first British monarch to earn a university degree, is expected to insert heft where his glamorous mother once wielded star power. His visit to Germany will give him an opportunity to highlight the causes he holds dear, like sustainability and the environment.
But there will also be a full dose of the pomp and circumstance that screams royal visit, starting with the ceremonial welcome at the Brandenburg Gate and a white tie dinner at Schloss Bellevue, the German president’s official residence, on Wednesday evening.
Royal fans started lining up early in the morning for security checks at the Brandenburg Gate, hoping to get a close view of Charles and Camilla. By noon, hundreds of fans awaited their arrival as police and sniffer dogs worked in the area. About 1,500 spectators were admitted to the cordoned-off area, German news agency dpa reported.
Christoph Muehlbach, 59, had traveled by train from Hamburg to see the British royals. He described himself as a supporter of the royal family for the last 20 years and said he had traveled to London in the past for weddings, anniversaries and the queen’s state funeral.
“I take great pleasure in the British royal family,” Muehlbach told dpa.
Gabriele Fluechter, 57, of Berlin, said she came “out of love for England,” where she had attended university. She said she had seen Elizabeth on one of the queen’s visits to Berlin, and also had spotted Charles and Camilla before.
“They walked along there very casually,” she said, adding that the long wait was no problem,
On Thursday, the king is scheduled to give a speech to the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. He will also meet Chancellor Olaf Scholz, talk to Ukrainian refugees, and meet with British and Germany military personnel who are working together on joint projects. In the afternoon he will visit an organic farm outside of Berlin.
The royal couple plan to go to Hamburg on Friday, where they will visit the Kindertransport memorial for Jewish children who fled from Germany to Britain during the Third Reich, and attend a green energy event before returning to the UK
The king was urged to make the trip by Sunak, who during his first six months in office negotiated a settlement to the long-running dispute over post-Brexit trading rules for Northern Ireland and reached a deal with France to combat the people smugglers ferrying migrants across the English Channel in small boats. Sunak hopes goodwill created by a royal visit can help pave the way for progress on other issues, including Britain’s return to an EU program that funds scientific research across Europe.
Britain’s senior royals are among the most recognizable people on the planet. While their formal powers are strictly limited by law and tradition, they draw attention from the media and the public partly because of the historic ceremonies and regalia that accompany them — and also because the public is fascinated by their personal lives.
Elizabeth’s influence stemmed in part from the fact that she made more than 100 state visits during her 70 years on the throne, meeting presidents and prime ministers around the world in a reign that lasted from the Cold War to the information age.
Politicians were eager to meet the monarch for tea, if for no other reason than she’d been around so long.


Ukraine sets eyes on Filipino workers to help rebuild war-torn cities

Ukraine sets eyes on Filipino workers to help rebuild war-torn cities
Updated 29 March 2023

Ukraine sets eyes on Filipino workers to help rebuild war-torn cities

Ukraine sets eyes on Filipino workers to help rebuild war-torn cities
  • Philippines is a ‘priority nation’ in the region, Kyiv’s envoy says
  • Ukraine is also offering potential cooperation in IT, e-governance

MANILA: Ukraine is planning to attract Filipino workers to help rebuild its cities ravaged by Russia’s invasion, Kyiv’s envoy said on Wednesday.
Russia began a multipronged attack on Ukrainian territory and major cities in February last year, destroying critical infrastructure, hundreds of thousands of homes, and forcing more than 8 million people to flee to neighboring European countries.
The country’s reconstruction is expected to stretch over at least 10 years, costing $411 billion, according to a World Bank report released last week.
As leaders lay postwar plans, Denys Mykhailiuk, chargé d’affaires of the Ukraine Embassy in Malaysia, which holds jurisdiction over the Philippines, was on a four-day trip to the archipelagic nation to explore potential cooperation.
He told reporters in Makati City that talks would soon be initiated regarding Filipino workers helping in the reconstruction effort as “whole cities (were) wiped out.”
He added that “hardworking Filipinos” and investors from the country “will be very much welcomed.”
Ukraine is also planning to increase bilateral trade and open an embassy in the Philippines later this year, Mykhailuk said, describing the Southeast Asian country as a “priority nation” in the region.
“Unfortunately, since the war started, they have a drop of 94 percent in bilateral trade. We want to remedy (this), and we proposed to our partners of the Republic of Philippines several ways to do so,” Mykhailuk said.
Kyiv, a major exporter of wheat, has offered to help Manila build a “grain bank” and work together in information technology and e-governance, the envoy said.
Mykhailiuk’s visit comes about a month after President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had their first phone call, during which the two leaders discussed how to further bilateral cooperation.