Drug cartel

Montenegrin police director assistant Dejan Knezevic in his office in Podgorica. Photo: Government of Montenegro

Knezevic was arrested as part of a large-scale investigation of police links with the notorious Kavac drug gang, which has led to 12 current and ex-police officers' arrests and to national warrants for the arrest of three others.

Istanbul police have caught the leader of the Comanchero, one of the leading drug gangs in Australia, sought with red notice.

Duax Ngakuru, against whom a search warrant was issued at the international level was caught in his villa in the Sarıyer district.

Police await official confirmation of reports on Thursday that Jovan Vukotic, the alleged head of the notorious Skaljari drug gang, was killed in Turkey.

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.

The excitement was understandable. Dairo Antonio Usuga, better known in Colombia as 'Otoniel', was the country's most wanted drug trafficker, a former guerrilla turned leader of El Clan del Golfo, the biggest criminal gang in Colombia. 

He was arrested in late October, 500 soldiers and 22 helicopters descending on his rural hideout in northwestern Colombia.

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.

Authorities say the slaughter is drug related.

Seven people have been arrested after the killing of three women and six children from a Mormon community in northern Mexico. This was reported by the prosecutor's office of the country, cited by AFP.

Speaking in April last year, Britain's ambassador to Albania, Duncan Norman, said "60 to 70 per cent" of 726 Albanian inmates at that time in Britain were from these three northern counties.

Deeply impoverished, the region has become a rich recruitment ground for the Albanian crime gangs that now dominate the cocaine market in Britain.

These gangs, also known as "Mafia Shqiptare", have slowly take over the market in this country "after steadily moving into the country after the fall of communism in Albania in 1990."

A notorious trafficker was killed in Colombia by the army, said President Juan Manuel Santos, quoted by the France press.