A recently published secret police report inFrance has revealed that heroin trafficking in the northeast of the country is controlled by Turkish criminal groups, the dailyLe Figaro has reported.
The report, published by the Department of Intelligence and Analysis on Organized Crime (Sirasco) commissioner Dimitri Zoulas, shows that foreign syndicates have increased in France.
Turkish groups reportedly collaborate with traffickers in a number of cities to transport and distribute goods imported from Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. The FrenchInterior Ministry has recently decided to increase security measures on the issue. France consumes about €2 billion per year in illicit drugs.
Many of the criminal groups with whom the Turks collaborate are comprised largely of Albanian immigrants.
The police report, in fact, comes just one week after a major drug bust which resulted in the arrest of 42 people, almost all of them ethnic Albanians. The raid was the culmination of two years of investigating an Albanian heroin smuggling ring, Le Figaro and others reported.
The Albanian presence as traffickers in France and Western Europe is thought to date back to the 1990s. New York University professor of global affairs Mark Galeotti estimates that Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Greece have absorbed 300,000 illegal Albanian immigrants since 1991.
Furthermore, he writes, upwards of 70 percent of heroin trafficked in Europe is now thought to be Albanian, managed in “close collaboration with Turkish groups and, to a further extent, with the opium producers in Central Asia and Afghanistan.”