Latest news with #Ofast
LeMonde
21-05-2025
- LeMonde
The Marseille police tried to set up a drug lord with 360 kilos of cocaine. The operation ended in total fiasco
"Imagine if an article comes out saying that Ofast [France's national anti-narcotics agency] imported narcotics into French territory and some people helped themselves (...) by selling the product through their own informants." On March 22, 2024, during a phone call with his wife, Hervé (his name has been changed) summed up, in a few words, the case that has been shaking the Marseille branch of Ofast for a year. The revelations of this 60-year-old locksmith and police reservist are at the origin of a vast investigation filled with pitfalls, legal breaches and twists. At its core: the creation of a cocaine trafficking network from scratch, informants paid in kilos of product, the handling of drugs and dirty money – all under the very lenient oversight of local anti-drug police chiefs. All of it was in the hope of a career-defining bust to take down Mohamed Djeha, aka "Mimo," one of the biggest drug traffickers in France. The Marseille police crossed one red line after the other. They thought they had cleverly turned this extraordinary and appalling case into a routine corruption one: a handful of rogue officers, a few missing blocks of drugs, "business as usual." But over the course of a more than 3,000-page case file, which Le Monde was able to review, the investigation conducted by France's internal police oversight body, the IGPN, and now under the authority of the national jurisdiction for organized crime, revealed a different reality. At the end of 2022, the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) provided Ofast with first-hand information: a shipment of several hundred kilos of cocaine was set to cross the Atlantic, hidden among two containers of bananas destined for Marseille. The Colombian exporter, operating through an import-export company, was a seasoned trafficker, well-known to American investigators.
Local France
05-04-2025
- Local France
Two French anti-narcotics cops accused of drug trafficking
Both officers, who worked for the national anti-drug agency Ofast in the southern coastal city of Marseille, were implicated in an investigation involving the smuggling of at least 360 kilogrammes of cocaine from Colombia, the office added. After being placed in police custody on Monday, the two accused were indicted on charges including "importation and trafficking of drugs in an organised gang, money laundering, criminal conspiracy, (and) forgery of a public document". Their actions were "completely outside the chain of command," the prosecutors added, requesting the officers be remanded in custody to prevent them from conferring with each other. Following an anonymous tip-off in February 2023, police began tracking a planned cocaine delivery destined for Paris via the Mediterranean port of Marseille. "As part of this investigation, it had been agreed to monitor the arrival of a shipment of 180 to 200 kilogrammes of cocaine, however, it turned out that this delivery had allowed nearly 400 kilogrammes of cocaine to enter the country," the prosecutor's office said. Faced with the discrepancy between the information received and the eventual delivery's size, the Ofast agency withdrew from the operation. Advertisement "Several people involved in the case expressed surprise at the ease with which the drugs were moved to Marseille, suggesting that police surveillance had been breached," the office said. The initial investigation was closed in January 2024 without any arrests. But that month officers informed France's Inspectorate General of the National Police of their suspicions over the delivery, with officers then searching the premises of Ofast's Marseille branch in April 2024.
