Nineteen people placed in police custody, searches carried out in 25 points of the territory, from Seine-Maritime to Yvelines via Val-de-Marne and Eure, 150 police officers mobilized, including columns of the RAID, from the BRI of Le Havre and 60 investigators of the judicial police (PJ), the seizure of one million euros – including 375,000 euros in cash -, fifteen kilos of heroin, vehicles, weapons … The operation large-scale conducted Friday, October 8 in the morning and revealed by Agence France-Presse has, according to a judicial source, “Undoubtedly decapitated the most important network of traffickers in the Rouen region, at the source of 75% of the supply of the Norman metropolis in narcotics”.
She also questioned the investigators of the departmental security (SD) of Rouen, at the origin of this extraordinary affair: the town hall of the small town of Canteleu, in Seine-Maritime, was it placed under the control of a network drug traffickers? Among those arrested are indeed the mayor (Socialist Party-Europe Ecology-The Greens), Mélanie Boulanger, also vice-president of the metropolis in charge of youth, higher education and research, and the one of his deputies in charge of economic development, Hasbi C., whose SD tries to disentangle the respective roles in this file and the relations maintained with the family M., presented by the same source as “Essential in the drug trafficking of the region”.
Two years of investigations
Very established in Canteleu, the M.s also manage their affairs from their rear base in Morocco, where the heads of the network of this family have taken refuge and have invested heavily, in particular in flourishing real estate businesses. Described as “Structured”, “Smart” and “Multi-card”, carefully compartmentalizing their teams and “Able to import indiscriminately cannabis, cocaine and heroin – their specialty”, M.s were forced to reorganize their logistics circuits several months ago due to the Covid-19 pandemic. To do this, they would have abandoned their traditional import channel through Spain to turn to the Netherlands. Friday, several of those arrested were returning precisely from Holland, where they had gone to renew their stock of merchandise.
According to our information, the investigations began two years ago, in September 2019, when the PJ of Seine-Saint-Denis arrested two traffickers who were preparing to exchange two kilos of cocaine in the act. After a chase, the two individuals are apprehended in a parking lot in La Plaine, after having tried to get rid of the drugs. Inside the vehicle used by one of them, the police also discovered 60,000 euros in cash.
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