In a joint statement by the public prosecutor's office in Zweibrücken, the customs investigation office in Frankfurt/Main and the Pirmasens police department, even the seasoned professionals from the drug investigation department are amazed - the spectacular case of a smuggling family from Pirmasens offers "enough material for an exciting crime film". There are: "broken police barriers, wild pursuits, seizures of more than a tonne of hashish, prison escapes, seizures of high-value vehicles and smuggling boats, imprisonment of eleven people in Spain and Germany, asset recovery measures totalling 8.5 million euros."
A team of investigators had been on the trail of the smuggling gang for 18 months, since April last year. A Porsche Cayenne broke through several police barriers in the Spanish-French border region and was soon found abandoned. During an investigation of the vehicle, the police discovered 60 kilograms of hashish.
The trail led to a 60-year-old woman and her 64-year-old husband from Pirmasens, who were trading in cars and boats - as it soon turned out, "to disguise their illegal business". The police investigated: the couple and their 31-year-old son belonged to an international criminal organisation that imported drugs from Africa to Europe by boat and distributed them all the way to Finland.
A joint investigation team gets on the trail of the drug smugglers
In order to track down the criminals, the investigators formed a joint German-Spanish group. In police jargon, such a multinational force is called a "Joint Investigation Team", which is a particularly apt term in this context.
In July, its members caught the wife and mother in a VW Touareg on the A62 motorway near Landstuhl - on their way to Scandinavia with 42 kilograms of hashish. The woman was remanded in custody, but made allegations "that required further investigation". The suspect was released from custody in January 2014 - and immediately became active again. The same applies to the son, who had been detained in Spain in the meantime and managed to escape from a prison.
The family organised another drug transport across the Mediterranean in February 2014. But they remained in the sights of the investigators. Coming from Morocco, the sailing yacht "Lady Blue" was seized and searched in the harbour of La Duquesa south of Malaga. There was about a tonne of hashish on board.
This defeat, accompanied by high financial losses, only fuelled the criminals' activities even more. According to the authorities, the "Pirmasens cell" separated from its backers in Morocco and set up its own organisation, which was joined by a 50-year-old man and his 46-year-old wife, both also from Pirmasens. "Familiar division of labour, well-rehearsed and extremely conspiratorial", as the police describe it, continued in the usual style.
Access on the L 700
The haunting ended a few days ago with a police operation on the L 700 near Hornbach in the south-west Palatinate. There, the officers stopped a small convoy consisting of a "reconnaissance vehicle" and a drug transporter, occupied by the old acquaintances. They found 30 kilograms of hashish in the side panelling of their Opel Astra convertible.
Now the drug squad has cracked down. In Malaga and Melilla, the Spanish enclave in North Africa, and here in Germany in Pirmasens, Hagen and Frankfurt/Main, a total of 20 people were provisionally arrested and eleven were remanded in custody. Several offence vehicles, boats and "assets in the seven-figure euro range" were seized.
This case is just another in a series of similar ones: in the recent past, there have been more and more reports of drug smuggling by yacht. It was only in September that a yacht coming from the Caribbean was seized off Ireland - with cocaine worth 100 million euros.
