Big seizure of the French gendarmerie. Trafficking in khat, a shrub considered a narcotic, between Israel, France and the Netherlands, involving more than 8 tons of goods for a market value of 1.2 million euros, has been dismantled. The investigation allowed last Tuesday the arrest in the act of “nine mules and traffickers”, the seizure of “242 kilos of khat, 28,000 euros and two vehicles”, indicates a press release from the national gendarmerie.
The defendants were presented to justice on Friday, according to the same source. The investigation began last summer on the basis of intelligence from the Air Transport Research Section (SRTA), which uncovered a “sustained” supply of khat by air from Israel in the East African communities in Paris and the Netherlands, indicates the gendarmerie. A preliminary investigation was then opened by the Paris prosecutor’s office.
A mule recruitment in Israel
According to the investigations of the gendarmes, the organizers of this traffic recruited mules in Israel to transport the narcotics in their luggage. Once they arrived in France, the mules went to hotels located near the airport where “the luggage was picked up by members of the network to then supply their customers in the Netherlands or Paris, mainly at Porte de la Chapelle” , added the gendarmerie.
“In eight months, more than fifty trips have allowed more than eight tons of khat to be transported by commercial air,” according to the investigators. The operation carried out on Tuesday in the hotel area of Roissy mobilized 50 soldiers from the air transport gendarmerie, the judicial pole of the national gendarmerie and the gendarmerie region of Île-de-France.