14.03.23 – A Homemade Submarine Was Found Carrying 2 Tons of Cocaine and 2 Dead Bodies. A narco submarine was discovered off the coast of Colombia containing over two tons of cocaine worth $87 million, as well as two dead bodies. The 15-meter long homemade sub was found floating in the Pacific over the weekend, most likely bound for Central America, an important corridor for transporting cocaine north toward the United States.
14.03.23 – Stranded ‘narco-submarine’ refloated in northwestern Spain. Spanish police refloated a stranded custom-built semi-submersible vessel on Tuesday allegedly used to smuggle cocaine into Europe and found it to be empty, authorities said. Discovered on the bed of an estuary in the northwestern region of Galicia, it is the second of its kind seized in the area after a vessel carrying over 3 tonnes of Colombian cocaine was abandoned by its pilot in another Galician estuary in 2019.
14.03.23 – Crackdown on criminal network that produced and distributed methamphetamine in Europe. With the support of Eurojust and Europol, judicial and law enforcement authorities in the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania and Slovakia have dismantled an organised crime group (OCG) responsible for the production and distribution of at least 4.7 tonnes of methamphetamine in Europe. During a joint action, 16 suspects were arrested and over 3.3 million tablets containing raw material for the production of the drug were seized.
15.03.23 – One of the darkweb’s largest cryptocurrency laundromats washed out. German and US authorities, supported by Europol, have targeted ChipMixer, a cryptocurrency mixer well-known in the cybercriminal underworld. The investigation was also supported by Belgium, Poland and Switzerland. On 15 March, national authorities took down the infrastructure of the platform for its alleged involvement in money laundering activities and seized four servers, about 1909.4 Bitcoins in 55 transactions (approx. EUR 44.2 million) and 7 TB of data.
15.03.23 – Lula insists on demarcating indigenous lands in Amazon rainforest. President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva Tuesday pledged to expand the indigenous territories in northeast Brazil in a move to expel organized crime groups extracting natural resources from those areas. “When they say that the indigenous people are occupying 14% of the national territory, they should remember that they have had 100% of the national territory; it is the others who occupy 86%,” Lula recalled while insisting that the expansion of indigenous territories was a necessity to preserve the Amazon.
16.03.23 – Antwerp customs seize huge batch of cocaine. A batch of cocaine weighing several hundred kilos was seized at the port of Antwerp on Thursday, the Federal Department of Finance said in a statement.The drugs were in two vans checked by the police following suspicious acts near Quay 1333. “The consignment of drugs most likely came from one of the South American Grimaldi ships moored at this location,” the Department stated.
