Major Drug Ring with Moroccan Ties Busted in Northern France; 19 Arrested

It all started with the arrest in flagrante delicto of two traffickers by the judicial police of Seine-Saint-Denis in September 2019. As they were about to exchange two kilos of cocaine, these two traffickers had been arrested in a parking lot in La Plaine after a car chase. The police had seized a sum of 60,000 euros in cash that was inside the vehicle used by one of them.

The investigations continued until the dismantling of this vast drug trafficking network last Friday, October 8. In action, 150 police officers, including RAID columns, the BRI of Rouen and 60 investigators from the departmental security service. In total, 19 people were arrested and then taken into custody. Among them, the mayor (Socialist Party-Europe Ecology-The Greens), Mélanie Boulanger, also vice-president of the metropolis in charge of youth, higher education and research, and one of her deputies in charge of economic development, Hasbi Colak.

According to a judicial source, this operation has "probably decapitated the most important network of traffickers in the Rouen region, at the source of 75% of the supply of the Norman metropolis in drugs," reports the AFP. The M. family is presented as "essential in the drug trafficking of the region". Present in Canteleu, it has its rear base in Morocco and it is from the kingdom that the business is managed. The heads of this family’s network have taken refuge there and are investing, in particular, in good real estate deals. With their teams, the M. are "capable of importing indifferently cannabis, cocaine and heroin - their specialty".