The drugs were seized in Sueca and the two defendants, one of them a resident of l’Alfàs del Pi, have pleaded guilty in the trial.

Four arrested in l’Alfàs, Alcoy and Sueca with almost half a ton of cocaine / INFORMATION

Closed 03 APR 2025 17:28 – Updated 03 APR 2025 19:21

Two defendants accused of trying to smuggle into  Spain a cache of 464 kilos of cocaine hidden in cylinders of a crushing machine that was sent from Colombia to a warehouse in La Nucía, and later transferred to a company in Sueca, have pleaded guilty today in a trial held at the Court of Valencia and have been sentenced “in voce” to two sentences of four years and three years, seven months and fifteen days in prison for a crime of attempted drug trafficking.

The request for penalties, not very high despite the fact that it is a cache of cocaine valued at almost 19 million euros sold wholesale on the illicit market, has been raised after an agreement reached between the Prosecutor’s Office and the defense lawyers.

The defendants, a resident of Sueca sentenced to less than four years who has been defended by the lawyer Francisco Miguel Galiana Botella, and another with an address in l’Alfàs del Pi and punished with four years in prison, defended by the lawyer Miguel Ferrer, had no criminal record and in addition to the prison sentence have been sentenced to pay fines of ten million euros, subject to a subsidiary personal liability of 15 days of deprivation of liberty.

Four people were initially arrested in January 2022 in l’Alfàs del Pi, Alcoy and Sueca for this cache, although the Prosecutor’s Office requested during the investigation of the case the dismissal of two of them, one of which was also defended by the lawyer Francisco Galiana.

Exporting coca from Colombia to Spain

The anti-drug operation was carried out by the Organized Crime Team (ECO) of Alicante, belonging to the Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard, and the Directorate of Customs Surveillance. Investigators uncovered a scheme to export a significant amount of cocaine and found out that the drug would arrive hidden in a container transported on a ship that set sail from the port of Santa Marta in Colombia on December 15, 2021. The destination of the ship from Colombia was the port of Valencia and the National Court authorised the circulation or controlled delivery of the suspicious container.

One of the two defendants, the resident of l’Alfàs, is the director of a metallurgical company with headquarters in Madrid that was listed as the buyer of an industrial shredding machine. This defendant contacted the customs services of the port of Valencia months earlier to indicate that the delivery address of the goods was La Nucía, specifically in a warehouse rented by the defendant in February 2021 as the headquarters of a metallurgical construction and manufacturing company, according to the facts that are the subject of accusation by the Prosecutor’s Office that have been acknowledged by the defendants.

However, both in the warehouse in La Nucía and in the company’s headquarters in Madrid, no commercial activity was carried out. The investigators only detected that in the La Nucía warehouse they conditioned a milling machine for the extraction of the cocaine that they were going to bring hidden in a machine. This milling machine was transferred in April 2021 to the Sueca company where months later the drug was seized.

The container containing the drugs was transferred on January 12, 2022 from the port of Valencia to a company in Silla, where a truck picked it up to take it to La Nucía. In the Alicante warehouse the two defendants coincided and the machinery was transferred at the same door to a boom truck that took it to the company of one of the defendants in Sueca. The defendants did not achieve their purpose of extracting the cocaine because the Civil Guard and Customs broke into the warehouse.

The investigators had to request help from the Valencia Fire Brigade Consortium to disassemble the machine and cut 14 cylinders of different sizes and inside which were the 464 kilos of cocaine.

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