The drugs were seized with the help of an undercover agent and the Court sentenced them in Elche to more than two years, but suspended the execution of the sentence.

Weapons seized in the anti-drug operation. /INFORMATION

Closed FEB 22, 2025 6:00 AM

The National Police described them as an armed group of the Marseille mafia and used an undercover agent authorized by a court in Torrevieja to apprehend seven drug traffickers with an arsenal of handguns and weapons of war and 373 kilos of cocaine imported through a company in San Vicente del Raspeig. Now, after just over a decade of the anti-drug operation, a sentence of conformity has been handed down in Section XI of the Provincial Court, based in Elche, and none of the seven defendants, three of them defended by lawyers Francisco Miguel Galiana Botella and Alicia Grau Córdoba and one by Miguel Ángel Garijo,  he will have to go to prison.

The sentence of the Court imposes sentences of between 13 months and two years and nine months in prison for crimes of drug trafficking, membership of a criminal group, falsehood to two of them and illegal possession of weapons in one of the cases. However, it agrees in the same ruling to suspend the execution of the prison sentences to all of them on the condition that they do not commit crimes in the next five years and each pay a fine of 1,350 euros. One of the seven defendants, convicted as an accomplice to drug trafficking, is suspended for only two years without committing a crime.

The court has applied to all the defendants the mitigating circumstance of very qualified undue delays, which has allowed the initial request of the Prosecutor’s Office, of between 9 and 12 years in prison, to be reduced.

According to the sentence, the National Police was alerted from France about a French citizen – declared in absentia – who had once again acted as an intermediary in the receipt in Spain of cocaine caches in containers from South America. This trafficker contacted people in Alicante who owned companies importing legal products in order to camouflage the “illicit importation”. Likewise, on December 23, 2013, he met in Torrevieja with a person to specify details of a future cocaine cache and the Police requested the use of an undercover agent.

Authorized undercover agent in Torrevieja

The Court of Instruction number 2 of Torrevieja authorized the measure of the undercover agent with the assumed name of Luis. This policeman met in Madrid with the investigated and in that meeting there was already talk of a future importation from South America of significant quantities of cocaine. They provided him with a mobile phone to contact another person involved and since then the Police have carried out an investigation that has made it possible to identify all those involved. One of them was the owner of a meat company with an address in the Canastell industrial estate in San Vicente del Raspeig and during 2014 several meetings were held in Alicante to prepare the shipment of the cocaine.

Container imported by a company from San Vicente where the cocaine was camouflaged. /INFORMATION

The meetings were later moved to Barcelona and Tarragona. In the latter province, the Police identified a warehouse that months later was where the cocaine cache and the arsenal of weapons were seized.