Romania Upholds Jail Terms for Serbian Black Sea Drug Traffickers

The Court of Appeal at the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta on Thursday upheld the nine years and four months prison sentences handed to two Serbian drug traffickers, Tode Krstic and Nenad Cvetkovic, by the Tulcea tribunal on November 13, 2020.

The Court of Appeal wrote on the Romanian justice ministry's website that it "rejected as unfounded the appeals of the accused". It said the verdict was "final".

The indictment said the two were part of an international organised crime group composed of several Serbian, Spanish and Romanian nationals constituted between February and March 2019. 

It had "the aim of buying a considerable amount of cocaine, possibly from South American countries, and to transport and place it for consumption in Western European states after transiting Romania".

The pair were arrested in March 2019, after a boat carrying at least one ton of cocaine capsized in the Danube Delta, where the river enters the Black Sea. They were driving the trucks in which the ill-fated shipment was to be transported across Romanian territory to Western Europe.

The arrests were made thanks to two guards at the parking lot where the drug traffickers were loading the bags of cocaine that did not fall into the water. They were suspicious of the two men and called the police after checking the content of the bags when the pair left the parking lot.

A RISE Project investigation revealed that the cocaine consignment had arrived in Romanian waters from Turkey, where it had been transported by ship from Brazil.

According to RISE, the shipment totalled three tons of cocaine and was ordered by a Serbian group known as the Balkan Cartel from Joseph Nour Eddine Nasrallah, a Lebanese-born Brazilian convicted drug trafficker...