More than a ton of cocaine packed between boxes of medical products: the trial against three men begins a good six months after the largest cocaine find in Bavaria to date. The Aschaffenburg public prosecutor accuses the 23, 26, and 45-year-old accused of drug trafficking on a large scale. Last June they are said to have tried to get the coke out of a container that had been transported from the Dominican Republic to Lower Franconia via the port of Hamburg. Content: Medical products for a Hessian company – and the cocaine.
The investigators estimate the street value of the smuggled goods at almost 109 million euros. Three days of hearings have been scheduled for the trial before the Criminal Court of the Aschaffenburg Regional Court, which begins next Monday, January 16th.
According to the investigators, foreign authorities had given their Bavarian colleagues a tip. Customs investigators then threw a spanner in the works for the suspects: they first secretly confiscated the drugs at the container terminal in Aschaffenburg, and a few days later they arrested the men in Friedberg, Hesse, when they wanted to pick up the substance in a van. The accused have been in custody since then, and the search for the backers is ongoing internationally. According to current knowledge, the Hessian company is not involved in the smuggling of transfusion bags.
Jürgen Thiel, head of the fight against drug smuggling at the Munich Customs Investigation Office, spoke after the successful thwarting in the summer of the largest single amount of cocaine that had been seized in Bavaria to date. According to the public prosecutor, there were 43 packages in total – with a high active ingredient content of between 76 and almost 92 percent.