Cocaine and hashish arrived in Spain from North African countries on powerful inflatable boats. In the middle of the Mediterranean, members of the criminal organization transferred the drugs to larger ships that ended up docking on the island of Ibiza, where the drugs were stored and subsequently distributed throughout the Balearic Islands or exported to other European countries. The Civil Guard and the National Police of the Balearic Islands believe that the criminal organization dedicated to trafficking this drug, led by the United Tribuns motorcycle gang, which had important relationships with other organizations across Europe, has been dismantled. In one of the phases of this operation, the former head of Narcotics of the Balearic National Police, Faustino Nogales, was arrested and is still in preventive detention accused of collaborating with the organization.
Operation Manso Enroque Bal began in September last year, when the Guardia Civil seized 200 kilos of hashish traveling on board a boat bound for Palma from the port of Ibiza. The next blow came on July 9, when 675 kilos of cocaine were seized in the port of Valencia. The drugs had previously been collected by another vessel in an unspecified point in the Mediterranean and had subsequently been transferred to Ibiza, where it had waited a few days before being sent to the peninsula and to several European countries. “To introduce the drug into Spain, they used powerful inflatable boats from North African countries. At a specific point in the Mediterranean, they transferred it to another boat which took it to the island of Ibiza, where it was stored for transfer to the peninsula or the rest of the Balearic Islands,” explained the spokesman for the Civil Guard of the Balearic Islands, Paco Molina.
In August, one of the hardest blows for the organization came with the arrest of 15 people, including the leader of the United Tribunes, Stefan Milojević, and inspector Faustino Nogales, former head of the Narcotics group of the National Police of the Balearic Islands. Both were sent to pre-trial detention after appearing in the guard court, Nogales accused of collaboration with the gang and Milojević of leading the importation and subsequent distribution of the drugs. In August, September and October, searches and arrests carried out by investigators led to the dismantling of several small drug sales outlets in places such as Palma, with one of the most active distribution centers in the town of Son Banya.
The spokesperson of the National Police of the Balearic Islands, Alejandro Becerra, underlined that one of the main difficulties encountered by investigators is the sophisticated systems used by their members to avoid being followed and located. “They took a lot of surveillance and counter-surveillance security measures, they used electronic means of beacons and geolocation to try to avoid detection,” Becerra said. During the searches, night vision binoculars, trackers, mobile phones and computers were seized. The final budget of the operation includes the seizure by the police and security bodies of 1,543,300 euros, 687 kilos of cocaine, 2,500 kilos of hashish, two kilos of marijuana, four marijuana plantations with more than 1,500 plants, one kilo of methamphetamines, speedheroin, LSD and ecstasy pills.
Five of the people arrested in this operation were tried by the Provincial Court of Palma in 2022 and sentenced to a total of 15 years in prison for drug trafficking. Milojević, sentenced to a year and a half in prison, did not go to prison because the court decided to suspend the execution of the sentence since he had no criminal record. The five defendants were defended by the lawyer Gonzalo Márquez, who was also arrested in this police operation, accused of collaboration in alleged money laundering. Milojević, in addition to being arrested in 2020, had previously been investigated for previous seizures of synthetic drugs and marijuana.
