Device underway led by internal affairs agents of the Catalan police that registers three homes and arrests six suspects
The Mossos d’Esquadra have activated this Friday at mid-morning an operation against a gang dedicated to the marijuana trafficking. According to the sources consulted by this newspaper, the police are carrying out three records simultaneously. These are two homes belonging to Girona and a third from the neighboring municipality of quarter. As announced by the Catalan police on twitter, there are six people detained.
The investigation is led by the Division of Internal Affairs (DAI) of the autonomic body. The DAI is the body of the Catalan police itself that investigates cases of malpractice by its agents, such as a case of alleged corruption such as the one that has motivated this operation in Girona: one of those arrested is a Mossos agent. The group would be dedicated to drug trafficking, mainly marijuana.
In recent years, and parallel to the cannabis boom that Catalonia and the rest of Spain are experiencing, different Catalan police officers or municipal bodies have been investigated or arrested for corrupt practices linked to black money from marijuana. This was the case with the case uncovered at the Santa Coloma de Farners police station (La Selva) a year and a half ago or, more recently, with the local police of Llinars del Vallès (Vallès Oriental).
Corruptive capacity of marijuana
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The Catalan police activated the ‘Plan d’Action Marijuana’ in 2018. Within that plan, the General Criminal Investigation Police Station (CGIC) commissioned the Central Crime Analysis Area (ACAC) to produce the report ‘The Marijuana Market in Catalonia’. The conclusions of the study, advanced by EL PERIÓDICO last July, advance a worrying scenario. Not only because of the violence that can break out between rival gangs, but also because the size of some of these criminal structures – most of foreign origin – that have nested in Catalonia to produce and export marijuana to the rest of the continent they can try to corrupt public powers to continue growing, as was also confirmed in an operation against four corrupt Mossos agents in Tarragona, last December.
Spain is the leading producer and exporter of cannabis in Europe. The demand from the rest of the continent has turned the eastern coast of the peninsula into a land infested with clandestine ‘indoor’ plantations and, given its proximity to the French border and the capital status of Barcelona –which attracts foreign investment–, Catalonia is the community Spanish autonomous community that produces the most and exports the most. The boom has caused foreign organizations to choose in recent years to settle here. “Since the cake is what it is and there are more and more criminals who are fighting over it, the risk of conflicts between gangs is growing,” sources from the CGIC have long emphasized.