Given all the publicity, documentaries etc the case generated it would be impossible for him to get a fair trial
Trying to remember back I thought phone evidence played a big part in the prosecutions case
It was a central plank to the case.
They used it to prove he had the burner phone and was responsible for the messages she got.
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In a customs building in the giant container port on the outskirts of Antwerp, Florence Angelici, of Belgium’s federal financial service, is studying x-ray images on a laptop that attest to the ingenuity of the modern drug smuggler.
These days it’s not just sports bags stuffed with cocaine snatched from the backs of lorries: the precious white drug, which sells on the street for €50 (£43) or so a gram, is found injected into pineapples or other fruit on the banana boats coming in from South America, hidden in the middle of planks of hardwood or secreted within the metal struts of the containers themselves.
“They can put cocaine into anything. You name it, they use it: sex toys, dog food … they even soak it into T-shirts and extract it later,” said Angelici. “They are really inventive.” Most operations appear to be run from over the border in the Netherlands, to which some 80 per cent of the drugs are sent for onward distribution across Europe, including Britain.
Cocaine has been found injected into fruit
MATTHIEU DEMEESTERE
“Belgium is suffering from spillover from the Netherlands, which has become a ‘narco state lite’,” said Teun Voeten, a Dutch-born sociologist who has studied Mexican drug cartels and written a book on his compatriots’ takeover of Antwerp’s drug trade.
Europol, the EU’s agency for law enforcement co-operation, announced the success of Operation Desert Light last week, which culminated in the arrest of 49 people in Dubai, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium and France suspected of belonging to a “super-cartel” responsible for smuggling a third of all cocaine into Europe. Six of those arrested in Dubai were described as “high-value targets”.
But it was business as usual in Antwerp, where a record almost 90 tonnes of the drug were seized in 2011, with the amount this year expected to top 100 tonnes – compared with the 73 tonnes confiscated in Rotterdam, its Dutch rival up the North Sea coast. Together the two ports form Europe’s main entry point for cocaine, most of which originates in Colombia and is often shipped via Panama, Ecuador or Paraguay.
The quantities seized in Antwerp are so great the incinerators used to destroy the drug cannot keep up, creating a “cocaine mountain” that would sell for hundreds of millions of pounds piled up at secure warehouses.
“The amount we see keeps increasing every year,” said Angelici. “Europe is very interesting for the traffickers because the price they can sell at is higher than in the US, where people are more into fentanyl and drugs like that and they have to go through the Mexican cartels, who take their commission.”
Despite high-profile successes, only 10 per cent of drugs coming through are thought to be detected. For that reason, major seizures do not appear to make a dent in cocaine’s street price, which has remained surprisingly stable.
Angelici’s colleagues are involved in an escalating game of cat and mouse with the traffickers. Containers are screened on the basis of cargoes, routes and the names of the companies involved, to assess which are high-risk and should be x-rayed or opened. At present that is just 1-2 per cent; physical examination of more could cause major delays.
In recent years security has also been tightened at the port, which spans a vast area on both sides of the River Scheldt larger than Antwerp itself. Artificial intelligence is increasingly used, and more x-ray machines are due to be installed. Authorities are also considering making use of electronic “noses” – technology capable of sniffing out the tiniest quantities of cocaine in the air within containers.
Shipping containers are screened for search on the basis of cargoes, routes and the names of the companies involved
FRANCOIS WALSCHAERTS/AFP
The traffickers, meanwhile, are increasingly trying to recruit people on the inside – not just dockers but also white collar workers who can access computer systems that track the progress through the port of the containers in which their consignments are hidden, and divert them if they have been earmarked for examination.
“These people either have vital information or can move physical things like drugs around,” said Stephan Vanfraechem, general director of Alfaport, an organisation that represents 360 private companies that work in the port.
Gang members approach workers coming off shift in the car park or go to bars where they hang out, and listen in to their conversations, he said. “They are looking for vulnerable people, people with money problems. It’s like a very specialised form of HR.
“They don’t come at you with a gun and tell you to do something. It’s more a matter of: ‘Would you like to earn a little extra money? It could take just 30 seconds and I’ll give you €50,000.’ But it will never stop. And it becomes increasingly violent.”
Information campaigns are being stepped up to fight this, but some are still tempted. A counter clerk at Antwerp’s Euroterminal was convicted last month of receiving €10,000 to insert a USB stick containing malware into a computer there. Police and customs officials have also been arrested.
The prospect of riches is also fuelling gang crime in Antwerp itself, a picturesque but thriving city of half a million people, where prosecutors have recorded 200 incidents of drug-related violence, threats, beatings and explosive devices over the past five years— including sometimes military grenades.
Bart De Wever, the city’s mayor, visited Colombia in February on a fact-finding mission; he was accompanied by Ahmed Aboutaleb, his opposite number from Rotterdam.
A common tactic by the gangs is firing shots or even setting off firecrackers in front of the houses of rivals – to intimidate them but also to draw the attention of police to them. The attacks are usually carried out by young men, often from ethnic minorities, who come over the border from the Netherlands and are easy for police to spot in their Dutch-registered cars.
Only 10 per cent of drugs coming through are thought to be detected
DIRK WAEM/AFP /GETTY IMAGES
The threat appears to be spreading: in September Vincent Van Quickenborne, the Belgian justice minister, and his family sought temporary refuge in a safe house after police got wind of a plot by members of the Dutch drug mafia to kidnap them from their home in Kortrijk, 60 miles southwest of Antwerp. Four Dutch suspects were arrested.
For an alarming taste of what may be to come, Belgian authorities need only look over the border to the Netherlands, which now experiences as many as 30 drug-related murders a year – among them the gunning-down on an Amsterdam street in July last year of Peter R de Vries, an investigative journalist who looked too closely into the workings of the gangs.
Voeten, the drugs expert, blames the Netherlands’ problems on the “schizophrenic” policy it has pursued over the past decades towards marijuana, which is illegal to produce but legal to buy in coffee shops. The result has been the creation of a huge underground business that later diversified not just into cocaine but also into crystal meth, in which the Dutch are the biggest producers in Europe, and of ecstasy, where they lead the world.
“They have this magical way of thinking that if you legalise drugs there won’t be any crime,” he said. “But if you make one drug legal, the gangs move to another substance.” To his alarm, Germany is now following the Netherlands down the same path.
Of the 49 people arrested in Desert Light, the most prominent is believed to be Edin Gacanin, alias “Tito”, who was born in Bosnia but spent much of his life in the Netherlands before moving to Dubai. They also include a 37-year-old Dutch Moroccan named by the Dutch media as Zouhair B, who allegedly smuggled three tonnes of cocaine to the Netherlands, worth well over €150 million. Europol said 30 tonnes of cocaine were seized during the course of a parallel investigation.
The “super-cartel” is thought to have been formed at the Dubai wedding in May 2017 of Daniel Kinahan, 45, an Irish boxing promoter, wanted by, among others, the US authorities, who in April announced a $5 million bounty for information about him, his father and brother, who are accused of drug smuggling, arms dealing and murder.
Another guest at the seven-star Burj al Arab hotel was Raffaele Imperiale, 48, a suspected boss of Italy’s Camorra, arrested in August last year in Dubai. In 2016 the Italian police discovered two Van Gogh paintings hidden behind a wall in the bathroom of a villa he owned near Naples that had been stolen 14 years earlier from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
The most prominent wedding guest was Ridouan Taghi, 44, a notorious alleged gangster of Moroccan-Dutch origin, who was arrested in Dubai in 2019 and is on trial accused of arranging the murder of six underworld associates. Fifteen other member of the so-called Mocro Maffia – a Dutch-Moroccan band – are his fellow defendants in the Marengo trial, the biggest in Dutch legal history, which is being staged in a fortified courtroom known as De Bunker.
Still reportedly in touch with the outside world from his cell in the Nieuw Vosseveld maximum-security prison, Taghi is suspected of having ordered the hit on De Vries, who was working with a gang member who turned witness for the prosecution, and also of involvement in a plot foiled in September to kidnap Princess Amalia, the 18-year-old student who is heir to the Dutch throne.
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I’d say he’s the most calculatedly evil murderer we’ve had in this country. Doesn’t even seem to have any mitigating factors from his childhood or anything. They surely won’t release him.
Interesting but not surprising.
The threat appears to be spreading: in September Vincent Van Quickenborne, the Belgian justice minister, and his family sought temporary refuge in a safe house after police got wind of a plot by members of the Dutch drug mafia to kidnap them from their home in Kortrijk, 60 miles southwest of Antwerp. Four Dutch suspects were arrested.
Fuck me
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That spar is the one that sells coffee for 2.20 or 2.10 or something. Cracking value to be had in finglas lads. I posted about it in some thread
Dublin, ya bleedin shithole.
RTE news : One dead, another injured in separate Dublin shootings
Also reports a notorious criminal was shot in the South East
Davy Fitz?
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Never heard of him
He is from Clondalkin. Shot dead a Kinahan associate about ten years ago.
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He should be saying goodbye to the circus at this stage and fucking off overseas. That’s 2 strikes.
Obviously he’s wondering anway but you have to love the way the paranoia is ratcheted up by the Gardai/press about how they knew where he’d be.
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