Cocaine

Albania's Special Prosecution, SPAK, in collaboration with Bergamo prosecutors in Italy have announced the conclusion of an operation that resulted in the seizure of large amounts of drugs in Italy.

The criminal group responsible for the drug-running was led by three Albanians, according to the special prosecutor. Twenty other persons face trial as part of this criminal group.

Some 119 kilos of cocaine with a street value of more than 5 million euros was found and seized from a container from Ecuador that docked at the port of Piraeus by auditors of the Independent Authority for Public Revenue following an investigation at the port. 

Five people died and 16 were injured in an explosion Sunday in the Ecuadoran port city of Guayaquil in an attack the government blamed on organized crime, officials said.

President Guillermo Lasso declared a state of emergency in the country's second largest city of Guayaquil, where eight houses and two cars were destroyed in the blast.

Albanian police on Wednesday seized 45.5 kg of cocaine found in a container in the Port of Durres during a police operation codenamed "Transit".

The company's administrator and a customs agent contracted by the company were detained on charges of trafficking in narcotics.

In addition to Saric and lawyer Dejan Lazarevic, Uros Misic was also questioned.
As "Novosti" previously learned, the Prosecutor's Office for Organized Crime (TOK) issued an order to launch a new investigation against Darko Saric.

More than 500 kilograms of cocaine have been seized on a Turkish-flagged fishing boat off the coast of Guinea and 10 people have been detained in connection with the drug smuggling, the Turkish Directorate General of Security has announced.

Austria's public broadcaster ORF, in a news report on Sunday, said the amount of hard drugs coming from the Balkans to Austria had dramatically increased recently, making effective control of the Austria-Slovenia border region of Carinthia hard to handle for law enforcement.

The UNODC report also contains some interesting data about cocaine pricing in Europe and the United States

The police try to see how all those kilos of cocaine reached the group and then how they channeled it to the Athenian elite

Anti-narcotics teams in the capital Ankara have unveiled cocaine traffic between a Colombian drug cartel, Cali, and seven Turkish drug barons in a nine-month surveillance, according to a report by the daily Hürriyet.

"Cali cartel sent the drugs in boxes of flowers, bananas, coffee or strawberries, using air and sea routes," the report said on Oct. 3.