Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain… A vast anti-Mafia operation, called Eureka, was carried out this Wednesday in several European countries. It targets “more than a hundred alleged members of the Calabrian mafia”, the ‘Ndrangheta, said the Belgian prosecutor’s office. This “large-scale European operation” was organized within the framework of “a file opened by the Belgian federal prosecution”, in cooperation with the Belgian judicial police, the European agencies Europol and Eurojust, underlined the prosecution.
Hundreds of German police officers thus intervened in five regions of Germany as part of this “large-scale” operation, several regional prosecutors’ offices, including Munich, said in a joint statement. In Germany, 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 of Saarland. It is in these regions of western and southern Germany that police operations have been concentrated.
More than 100 arrest warrants
The investigation relates, according to the press release, to the following crimes: “drug trafficking, money laundering, arms trafficking, fraud and various large-scale tax crimes”. According to the German media MDR and FAZ, more than 100 arrest warrants must be executed this Wednesday in different countries. Bavaria’s Interior Minister, Joachim Herrmann, described the operation as a “sensitive blow to the ‘Ndrangetha”, a criminal organization based in the Italian region of Calabria (south) and considered to be the richest mafia and the most powerful in Italy, with a growing global extension covering more than 40 countries.
Operation Eureka, launched at European level more than three years ago, is “one of the most important and significant of recent years in the field of organized crime in Italy”, underlined the Bavarian police. As part of these investigations, the Italian and Belgian authorities were able to attribute to the ‘Ndrangetha the import and trafficking of nearly 25 t of cocaine, for the period from October 2019 to January 2022, said the same source. . Financial flows of more than 22 million euros from Calabria to Belgium, the Netherlands and South America have also been identified.