Major Cannabis Trafficking Suspect Arrested in Spain After Years on the Run

End of the run for these three drug traffickers arrested on Wednesday and Thursday. The court had convicted one of them for attempted murder during a shootout in Aubervilliers (Seine-Saint-Denis) in 2017, against a backdrop of drug trafficking, reports France bleu. According to a police source, this 28-year-old man was "a trafficker who ran several drug dealing points in Pantin". He had been incarcerated before being released. Absent from his trial in February 2020, he had been sentenced to 9 years in prison. Investigators from the National Brigade for the Search of Fugitives (BNRF) managed to arrest him on Wednesday, February 3, in Courbevoie (Hauts-de-Seine) as he was leaving the underground parking lot of a building he frequented.

The second trafficker had been on the run since 2016. He had received two four-year prison sentences in two separate cases: one for a case of importing cannabis resin between Morocco and the Paris region and the other for cocaine trafficking between the West Indies and the mainland. The Spanish police arrested him on Thursday, February 4, in a street in Marbella, where he had settled. He will be extradited to France to serve his sentence.

A 40-year-old trafficker from Creil (Oise), a regular of the "go fast" between France and Spain, is the third person on the list. He had been wanted since late 2017. The criminal had been convicted in absentia to six years in prison for his involvement in the seizure in 2011 of 806 kilos of cannabis resin in the Basque Country. On Thursday, the law enforcement officers arrested him near a house in Villers-Saint-Paul (Oise), a neighboring town of Creil, where some of his relatives live. He will be brought before the court in Senlis and then incarcerated in Beauvais.