“We think that among the arrests were several persons of a high value who played a huge role in the organisation, not only in Belgium but in other European countries,” Belgian federal prosecutor Antoon Schotsaert said. Related investigations led to the arrest of 24 people in Germany, they said.Ī man was also arrested in the southern Spanish city of Málaga, 13 people were detained in Belgium, and Portugal’s judiciary police said its officers had arrested a 62-year-old Italian man on charges of money laundering and drug trafficking.Īssets worth about €25m were seized in Italy, Germany, Portugal and France in the operation, codenamed Eureka, which was launched in 2019 initially to investigate drug smuggling between Calabria and the Belgian city of Genk, Italian police said. More than €22m in illicit earnings from the drugs was allegedly funnelled from Calabria to Belgium, the Netherlands and South America.Ī total of 108 people were arrested in Italy and other EU countries on the orders of police in the southern city of Reggio Calabria, Italian police said. Italian and Belgian authorities said the syndicate was suspected of smuggling nearly 25 tonnes of cocaine from South America to Europe in container ships arriving in Antwerp, Rotterdam and the Calabrian port of Gioia Tauro between October 2019 and January 2022. The proceeds were laundered through restaurants, ice-cream shops and car washes, and the money sent back to Colombian drug producers via a Chinese wire-transfer service, according to Italian officials and a Carabinieri press release. Calabria’s ’Ndrangheta has overtaken Sicily’s Cosa Nostra as Italy’s most powerful and wealthy mafia, controlling the bulk of the cocaine flow into Europe. The investigation uncovered how the networks used ports in Ecuador, Panama and Brazil to ship Colombian drugs to northern European ports, while also trafficking in weapons.

The raids were part of a three-year investigation in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, Romania, Brazil and Panama into criminal networks trafficking drugs from South America to Europe and Australia, the EU’s police agency, Europol, said. “Today’s raids are one of the largest operations carried out so far in the fight against Italian organised crime,” the German interior minister, Nancy Faeser, said, adding they had “dealt a serious blow to the ’Ndrangheta”.

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