A vast police operation targeting the 'Ndrangheta (the Calabrian Mafia), was launched on the morning of Wednesday May 3 in several European countries, including Germany where searches and arrests were carried out, announced the judicial authorities of this country.
Hundreds of German police intervened in five Länder as part of a "large-scale European operation" which targets "leaders and members of the 'Ndrangheta", several regional prosecutor's offices, including Munich, said in a statement. .
More than 100 people were arrested, including 30 in Germany alone, the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) said. In addition, 105 people were arrested in Italy, and police operations also took place in France, Portugal, Slovenia, Romania, Brazil, Panama, and Belgium, where twenty searches were carried out. .
"One of the largest international operations ever conducted"
This "large-scale European operation" was organized within the framework of "a file opened by the Belgian federal prosecutor's office", in cooperation with the Belgian judicial police, the European agencies Europol and Eurojust, underlined the Belgian prosecutor's office.
The investigation behind these arrests, dubbed "Eureka", included "drug trafficking, arms trafficking, fraud and various large-scale tax crimes". It would be "one of the most important international operations ever carried out in the fight against the Calabrian mafia", explains FAZ. This operation is one of the "most significant in recent years in the field of organized crime in Italy", added the Bavarian police. It required more than four years of work from the German authorities, specifies the site of the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR), the public radio-television of central Germany.
To the various crimes attributed to the suspects is added money laundering; the investigators would have discovered a money laundering system based on a network of restaurants, pizzerias, cafes and ice cream parlors, in particular in the Rhineland of North Westphalia, adds the MDR.
"Sensitive Blow to the 'Ndrangetha"
On the ground, more than 1,000 police officers were mobilized on German territory, specifies the MDR. More than 100 searches were carried out and around 30 arrest warrants, including four European warrants, were executed, according to the authorities of the Länder of Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Saarland. .
Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann called the operation a "sensitive blow to the 'Ndrangetha", a criminal organization based in the Italian region of Calabria and considered the richest and most powerful mafia in Italy. , with a growing global reach covering more than 40 countries.
As part of these investigations, the Italian and Belgian authorities were able to attribute to the 'Ndrangetha the import and trafficking of nearly 25 tonnes of cocaine, for the period from October 2019 to January 2022, said the Bavarian police. . Financial flows of more than 22 million euros from Calabria to Belgium, the Netherlands and South America have also been identified.
