Operation of the Tax Agency against drug trafficking

• Mixing the drug with animal salt did not allow the detection of the drug with the usual 'narcotests'

• The container arrived at the port of Barcelona and was delivered 15 days later in Madrid, where six people were arrested.

• The manager of the importing company has also been arrested in Barcelona.

February 8, 2024.- Customs Surveillance officials from the Tax Agency, with the collaboration of the Colombian authorities, have seized 620 kilos of cocaine in Madrid that was traveling mixed with salt for animals in a container that landed at the port of Barcelona from Colombia. Seven people were arrested in the operation, including the manager of the importing company.

The operation began when it became known that a container had been sent to the port of Barcelona that could be carrying cocaine mixed with the cargo, which consisted of mineral salt for animal feed, and which would not be detectable by the field reagents normally used.

On January 8, the Barcelona Customs Surveillance Operational Unit detected a container from Colombia whose declared cargo consisted of 1,000 bags of salt and which was imported by a company based in Sant Cugat del Vallés.

At that time, the cargo was inspected and samples were taken from different bags for analysis by the Barcelona Customs Laboratory, revealing that some of them contained cocaine. The bags containing the drugs had a mark that distinguished them from the rest. A thorough review of all the bags was therefore carried out, and a total of 34 bags with the same mark were found. All of them contained cocaine mixed with salt.

For this reason, the telephone of the manager of the importing company was tapped by court order. Thanks to these wiretaps, it was learned that the merchandise was going to be transferred to a logistics warehouse in Madrid on January 11 with the intention of storing it for a few days while awaiting further unloading instructions.

Drugs travel to Madrid

In order to identify the members of the criminal organization, a controlled delivery operation was set up for the merchandise, which left the port of Barcelona on January 11, 2024 and was unloaded at a logistics warehouse in the Zona Franca. Later, on January 16, the goods were loaded onto another truck which took them to a logistics warehouse in Valdemoro (Madrid).

Finally, following new instructions, on January 22 the merchandise was delivered to a warehouse in Torrejón de Ardoz, where it was unloaded by three people who were in the warehouse. The unloading was carried out under the supervision of officers from the Central Mobile Brigade of the General Subdirectorate of Operations and the Madrid Regional Unit of the Customs Surveillance Service of the Tax Agency.

The 'notary' of the delivery and the importer arrested

After the unloading, a car with three people inside was detected near the warehouse and it was possible to see how one of the suspects who was inside the warehouse was leaving and holding meetings with the occupants of the car. At one point, one of the occupants of the car got out of the vehicle and also entered the warehouse, and the vehicle began to move off, at which point the Customs Surveillance team intervened and arrested the six people.

The six detainees are of Colombian and Ecuadorian origin. One of them had flown from Colombia on January 17, arriving in Spain via Barcelona airport. According to the investigations, this person would be the 'notary', the person who supervises the delivery of the goods to the recipients in this type of operation.

On 25 January, officers from the Barcelona Operational Unit proceeded to search the home of the manager of the importing company in Sant Cugat del Vallès, where he was arrested. The seven detainees have been brought before the courts and three of them have been ordered to be imprisoned and the rest released on bail but without passports.

The investigation involved Customs Surveillance officials from the Tax Agency's delegations in Catalonia, Castilla La Mancha and Madrid, and the Central Mobile Brigade of the General Subdirectorate of Operations.

In recent years, Colombian authorities have been warning of the use of increasingly sophisticated systems by drug traffickers to mix cocaine with other goods, so that the reagents that police forces normally use when they find a stash of cocaine do not give positive results, thus making it difficult to find shipments of this narcotic.