Austrian Report Highlights Spike in Drugs Flow From Balkans
Austrian broadcaster says flow of hard drugs along the 'Balkan route' across the Slovenia-Austria border has risen exponentially – making work much tougher for border police and customs in Carinthia.
According to Fjori Sinoruka’s report for Balkan News Austria’s public broadcaster ORF, in a news report on Sunday, said the amount of hard drugs coming from the Balkans to Austria had dramatically increased recently, making effective control of the Austria-Slovenia border region of Carinthia hard to handle for law enforcement.
“The drugs are increasingly being handed over in private homes, which makes investigations more difficult,” the report said.
The report quoted Christian Liebhauser on behalf of the state court saying that the amount of smuggled drugs has increased from grams to kilos. “We used to talk about grams, today we also talk about hard drugs like cocaine or heroin in terms of kilos,” Liebhauser was quoted as saying.
Carinthia has become a centre for drug smuggling in recent years, where handovers are often made in private homes, state criminal officer Karl Schnitzer said, adding that the drugs tend to be sold off quickly.
EuroActiv – a media organization – reported that in early December in Carinthia three men were tried for the sale of close to ten kilos of heroin. Police raids on 13 December at 16 different locations then saw the arrest of 11 suspects charged with trading cocaine. The targeted operators had all been smuggling cocaine from Slovenia into Austria.
2.6 TONS OF COCAİNE
Last September, Europol charged 61 people in a Balkan cartel with supplying Europe with cocaine. The operation covered eight countries and was coordinated by Europol`s European Serious Organized Crime office. The countries were: Spain, Croatia, Serbia, Germany, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United States and Colombia. 2.6 tons of cocaine and 324 kilos of marijuana were seized during the operation.
“This highly mobile criminal organisation had branches active in several European countries and was composed mainly of criminals from Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro and Slovenia,” Europol said.
According to the Austrian Interior Ministry’s Criminal Intelligence Service’s “Drug-Related Crime Annual Report 2019”, tougher drug policing policies implemented in the Balkans had resulted in “hundreds of arrests, seizures of large amounts of drugs and cash, and criminal convictions at home and abroad”.
A report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in 2015 described the Balkan route as “possibly the most important heroin trafficking route of all”.
This route starts from Afghanistan, runs through Iran and Turkey, and continues via Southeastern Europe to Western and Central Europe.
