Turkish authorities, working together with police in Europe, apprehended 234 individuals on Tuesday in a sweeping worldwide operation targeting massive drug trafficking networks. The collaborated raids occurred throughout 20 provinces in Turkey and in 5 European nations– Belgium, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and under the oversight of Europol.
According to Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya, 225 suspects were apprehended inside Turkey and 9 abroad, consisting of 10 people noted on Interpol’s red notification list. The operation, code-named “Orkinos-Bulut,” was targeted at taking apart 4 multinational criminal companies implicated of drug trafficking, cash laundering, murder, kidnapping, and blackmail.
” These groups are associated with dispersing drug from South America, heroin from Iran and Afghanistan, and miracle drugs such as euphoria and skunk produced in Europe,” Yerlikaya stated in a post on social networks platform X. He included that they likewise smuggled precursor chemicals from East Asia to Europe to support drug production.
The eight-month examination, performed in collaboration with Europol, revealed the structure and approaches of the trafficking networks. Authorities took properties worth 13 billion Turkish lira (about $341 million), consisting of property, cars, service shares, and savings account.
Tuesday’s crackdown is the current in a series of cross-border operations as Turkey tries to suppress its function as a transit point in international narcotics paths extending from Asia to Europe. The federal government has just recently stepped up its concentrate on the mob and illegal financing.