The ten defendants who appear this Monday at the Bordeaux Court of Appeal are men aged 30 to 44, five of whom are from the Lyon region. If they are tried until Wednesday, as part of a hearing the specialized interregional jurisdiction (Jirs) against organized crime, it is firstly because of a delivery error.
On January 24, 2020, a carpentry company based in Montussan, in Gironde, discovered with astonishment that its container from Brazil which was to be loaded with exotic wood contained drugs. Advised, the anti-narcotics office (OFAST) counted 660 bars of cocaine, for a total of 730 kg.
Two failed attempts to recover the drugs
The police suspected that the network would seek to recover its precious cargo after this huge blunder. She installed surveillance of the warehouse which bore fruit since three people tried to break in and were easily “picked up” by the agents. And a few hours later, a new team tries to enter the warehouse but the police are no longer there.
Thanks to DNA found on site, two of the defendants were arrested more than two years later and appeared for “attempted theft by trickery, break-in or escalation in a residential premises or a warehouse, aggravated by other circumstance.” For Maître Etienne Bouchareissas, the lawyer of one of them, no link has been revealed with the network: “He is accused of having entered the warehouse, in which there was no no more drugs. It’s a trial within a trial. »
Up to thirty years of criminal imprisonment
The investigation traced the thread of an organized crime ring and referred a total of ten men to the Bordeaux Court of Appeal, several of whom are repeat offenders for “drug trafficking” or “criminal conspiracy”. The actions targeted by the investigation date back to January 1, 2019 and took place in Lyon, Marseille, Nancy, Colmar but also in Belgium.
The penalty incurred for the importation of narcotics is thirty years of criminal imprisonment and a fine of 7,500,000 euros, when they are committed as part of an organized gang.