The Mossos d’Esquadra, in a joint operation with the Customs Surveillance Service of the Tax Agency, activated this Thursday at three in the afternoon a anti-drug control for trucks that circulate through the AP7. It’s about a unprecedented device because it has a scanner capable of checking the contents of cargo vehicles. This highway has become a ‘drug route’, the itinerary used by criminal organizations to transport the hashish of Morocco or dope from Spain to the rest of Europe.
The agents have set up a surprise control in Martorell in which they have used the only device of this type in Spain
The security forces do not have a scanner that allows them to analyze the load of large trucks. There is only one instrument like this. Is property of the Tax Agency and is used to inspect trucks leaving the Port of Barcelona. This Thursday’s device consisted of, in a pioneering way, moving this scanner to the highway and carrying out a random control of trucks.
The control has been located in the old toll of Martorell because it was necessary to have the maximum possible width to be able to remove the trucks from circulation without wreaking havoc on the flow of traffic. The anti-drug operation is expected to last about two hours. Depending on the result, it will be decided to repeat it in the future, police sources explain.
Investigations know that the highway is the route that traffickers use to move drugs through Europe. But without border controls, nor the availability of tools that allow cargo to be quickly registered – as is the case with the scanner that Thursday –, few controls of this type are carried out on the AP7.
The drugs hidden in the trucks are not visible; they usually travel hidden among legal products. And one rigorous inspection of a trailerwhich can be large, requires many hours for agents.
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There are no precise statistics on the amount of drugs that are transported daily through the AP7 to the rest of the continent. Since it is a clandestine activity, it is not easy to find out. But recently, the head of the Criminal Investigation Division (DIC) of the Mossos d’Esquadra, Joan Carles Granja, stressed that currently in Spain there is more marijuana production than ever and also more European demand than ever, “and it is evident that “All of that drug is not consumed in Catalonia. Most of it goes to Europe, and its exit is the AP7.”
Such is the concentration of marijuana on the AP7 that for a company like Endesa, the main electricity distributor in Catalonia – which has technology capable of recognizing from fraud figures where there is an indoor cannabis plantation – criminal organizations They no longer find space to install more nurseries near this expressway and that has caused plantations to begin to appear in other areas of the territory.