Boilers, drug waste, glassware, barrels and freezers. Entire pieces of laboratory material emerged on Tuesday from the enormous drug lab that had been discovered a day earlier. It was all hidden and crammed into a detached shed, surrounded by a forest of young trees from a nursery. Here, a large drug factory was secretly operating at full speed, for customers all over the world.
Two deer cross the muddy country road. Their eyes glint in the headlights. Wild has the sole reigns here. It is these dark areas that are so attractive to wildlife. But also for drug criminals.
No man’s land
On the west side are the meter-high distribution halls of the Borchwerf industrial estate in Roosendaal. With some effort you can see the dome of the basilica of Oudenbosch. No man’s land. “Turn the corner here and you are in the municipality of Rucphen, near Zegge,” says a man walking his dog.
Remote, no street lighting. The people who ran the lab on Spipesestraat knew what they were doing. But they were caught anyway on Monday.
To cook
In the blink of an eye, two suspects were handcuffed, men from the Rotterdam region. Everything points to a red-handed act and in that world that means: they were cooking drugs.
Fire brigade involved, for the hazardous substances. To check and ventilate the warehouse. All toxic fumes had to be removed. The typical smell of amphetamine was recognizable at times. Police specialists were then able to enter safely.
Camouflage
And so the investigations began. In peace. Behind a kind of wall of stacked furniture. As usual, camouflage.
Police experts use a kind of syringe to suck liquid from the thousand-liter barrels. They go through everything. Jerrycans, barrels and the large barrels. To see what’s inside. They wrote ‘PH14’ on a barrel with felt-tip pen. The acidity. It contains 700 liters.
Ice
A forklift takes out two large freezers. Well-known equipment from the synthetic drugs world. For finishing the ‘pegels’ or ‘ice’, as crystal meth is also called but also used by ecstasy makers.
The police are not saying exactly what kind of drugs they were making there, in the interest of the investigation. The two suspects are in restrictions and so nothing is shared with the outside world.
Blue barrels
Everything has been photographed, labelled, measured and sampled. Sometimes also packed in foil. It can go along with the trucks that have now driven into the narrow street.
Specialists remove the equipment part by part, as well as the typical blue barrels. Entire pallets are stacked with it.
Counting the large barrels alone, the quantities of chemicals exceed ten thousand liters. This seems to be one of the largest labs found in Brabant this year.
At the beginning of Tuesday evening the trucks are filled, two large trailers and a few smaller ones. The lab is empty. As far as is known, the dismantling went smoothly and faster than expected.
In the meantime, the mayor is preparing steps. The municipality of Halderberge has announced that it will await the police report and then close the building. For how long has not yet been determined.
If you want to know more about the drug lab in Oud-Gastel, read these stories:
Neighbors about large drug lab Oud-Gastel: ‘many suspicious activities’
old bakery converted into a drug lab: two suspects on the run