03/01 Niger police seize more than 200 kg of cocaine from mayor’s truck. The mayor and his driver, who were in the vehicle at the time, were arrested with 199 bricks of cocaine at a checkpoint on the road heading north out of the desert trading hub of Agadez, the sources said.
03/01 Nigerian police: 178,459 firearms unaccounted for 6.9 million euros paid to ghost contractors.
04/01 Poaching for the horticultural market threatens cycads in South Africa. Thousands of cycads have been dug up from the wild, with poachers using a legal cycad market to launder their harvests.
05/01 Refrigeration company workers tied to 4,100 kilos of cocaine in smuggling busts. Several employees of a well-known refrigeration company in Rotterdam allegedly helped smuggle over 4,100 kilos of cocaine with a street value of more than 300 million euros into the country. Police took two men from Rotterdam into custody concerning the case.
05/01 In a two-week long operation against firearms trafficking in the Sahel, 850 officers from across relevant law enforcement agencies seized a total of 594 firearms and several thousand rounds of ammunition, including among suspected terrorists, early December last year. The operation, code named KAFO, has taken place for the third consecutive year with the involvement of police, gendarmerie, customs, anti-trafficking airport cells, maritime authorities, as well as border and prosecution units and it aimed to disrupt illicit firearms trafficking flows.
06/01 New cocaine, marijuana trafficking connections between Colombia, Brazil. The dismantling of a gang trafficking marijuana and cocaine from Colombia to Brazil has revealed greater connections between organized crime in both countries.
08/01 Europol gives Spain more than €1m to fight transnational organised crime. It is aimed at combating organised crime in fields as diverse as trafficking in cannabis, heroin, and cocaine. Human trafficking, the facilitation of illegal immigration, crimes against property or against the environment, and illicit trafficking in firearms, are also in the scope of coverage.
