The Colombians who ran a drug lab in Zundert all receive a prison sentence. The court in Breda decided this. They must pay the cleaning costs together with the landlord of the warehouse. One of the lab technicians was seventy years old and came from Medellín, Colombia. He is one of the oldest drug cooks that the police ever arrested.
A warehouse with a smell. That became the building on the Achtmaalseweg on October 17 last year, literally and figuratively. Local residents complained of an acetone odor that caused headaches.
The police went to look. The strange thing was that the doors were closed but there were voices inside, like a banging sound. An officer crawled in through a window and saw two Spanish-speaking men, Dario (70) and Alvaro (57). Both were born in Medellín, the city of the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar.
White powder
The men said they were not alone. That is why the police called for reinforcement of an arrest team. The others were also arrested. They were Ruben (60) and Felipe (61), also Colombians from the Medellín area. One of the men was completely covered in white powder.
White powder was also on a car and caravan that were parked inside, on everything actually. Something was cooking in pans on hot plates. A pan was filled with a “warm clear, yellow-brown liquid with crystal formation on the liquid surface,” it was noted.
There were also more than ten thousand liters of flammable acetone, two thousand liters of ammonia and more than four hundred kilos of hydrochloric acid. Extremely dangerous, according to experts.
This was a drug lab as they often appeared in our country. In such a lab they mix procaine with acetone, ammonia and hydrochloric acid. This becomes very similar to cocaine, making it an ideal cutting agent for cocaine. Cutting is mixing with something similar, which increases the quantity and therefore the yield.
The four Colombians said at their trial last month that they were in Zundert to cook food, clean or tile a bathroom. One said that the air inside the warehouse was sickening. “What I saw was not correct.”
They feel like victims. “We had no keys, we were locked up. At the mercy of God.” The public prosecutor and the court do not believe that. They did not receive an answer to difficult questions, because in Spanish they would say ‘guardo silencio’. That means something like: ‘I invoke my right to remain silent’.
One of the Colombians, it turned out, had already been caught in a Dutch drug lab 26 years ago and convicted.
Scam?
One of the suspects’ lawyers questioned the drug production charges. That cutting was more of a scam. Because you can sell that procaine as fake cocaine. That would sometimes happen to tourists in Amsterdam.
But according to the court, they were really consciously engaged in drug production in Zundert. Two of the four cellphones found in the laboratory contained Spanish-language communications about international cocaine trafficking.
Bananas
“For example, videos of blocks of cocaine, of a drug lab and of containers with large chunks of white crystals were found in the phones, as well as images of ship transports of bananas from Colombia to Europe,” the verdict states.
And then there was the owner of the warehouse. He had rented the warehouse through an intermediary. “I’m just messed up, inside I’m boiling,” he said. The judges don’t believe him either. The Zundert (59) has been caught before. In the same building with a cannabis nursery and in Belgium with a warehouse that was used for cocaine trafficking. The man was given a year and a half in prison.
The Public Prosecution Service had also asked to impose fines on the men. But the court thought it was a better idea to make them pay for the cleaning costs. The five of them have to cough up a total of 10,293 euros.