A robbed truck, 9 tonnes of stolen cannabis and blurred traffickers forced to call the marshal – Liberation
An unexpected phone call. On the evening of April 21, the police and the gendarmerie of the Bouches-du-Rhône received several anonymous calls for the robbery, made a few minutes earlier in a vitrolles gas station, a truck and its goods. The details are precise and allow you to find in a few hours the vehicle stolen in a warehouse, near Lyon. By opening the doors of the van, the police fall on the precious cargo having aroused the concern of the informants to the point of contacting the police. In front of their amazed eyes, nine tonnes of cannabis resin.
« This is called a carrot in the jargon of drug traffickers, explain Paris Match A police officer specializing in the fight against drug trafficking. Drug flights between traffickers, it’s common but never of such magnitude. ” According to the first elements of the investigation, the truck came from Spain with its heavy load. Assailed between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. by several visibly well informed individuals, the heavyweight driver, helpless, has no other choice than to deliver the vehicle and the goods, which then headed north.
But blurred traffickers do not intend to leave them the usufruct of all this drug, estimated at 27 million euros. The general management of the national gendarmerie specifies with Release That the market value, therefore the shortfall for the organization, amounts to 72 million euros. The alert is given to the police. Mercantis even provide them with precise GPS coordinates, the heavy goods vehicle and the goods being provided with GPS beacons. Making it possible to go up the route borrowed by the thieves and to get their hands, in a few hours, on the booty in a village in the Lyon suburbs. According to information from Paris Match and France Infoat least two people have been arrested and placed in police custody, suspected of being behind cannabis flight. They have since been released. The cheated traffickers were not identified.
If their response seems to have worked, it is not impossible that thieves took part of the cargo. « We can imagine that this truck carried a little more than nine tonnes of cannabis, Says a police source to the magazine. This means that thieves have managed to dispatch part of the stolen drug. On this one, there are several teams of traffickers who have lost a lot of money. ”
This cannabis seizure is one of the most important in France. In May 2019, 11 tonnes of cannabis resin had been seized in the Besançon region, during the interception of several vehicles including a heavy goods vehicle on the A36 motorway towards Paris. The largest date of February 1999, with the entry of 23.5 tonnes of cannabis resin in the English Channel aboard a beating trawler, the Latvian flag, the Nemo, by French customs officials from Boulogne-sur-Mer.
Given the scale of this case, the local prosecutor’s office has gone out for the benefit of the national jurisdiction against organized crime (Junalco), which entrusted the investigations to the OFAST, the office dedicated to the fight against drug trafficking, the Lyon judicial police and the research section of the Gendarmerie de Lyon.
