In parallel, Belgium and France announced a decisive blow to the drug smuggling gangs, mainly due to their ability to decipher this application, which is a technical achievement in which Dutch investigators contributed, and made it possible, during the past months, to dismantle a huge cocaine smuggling network whose members are distributed between Dubai and various parts of Europe.
The complex investigation file in the Sky ECC case (the encrypted online application for communication between drug gangs) opened a window for European police departments into the bleak world of smugglers, from settling scores and torture in the Netherlands and Serbia, to threats and suspicions of corruption on an unprecedented level in Belgium.
And the director of the European Police (Europol), Catherine de Paul, sums up the process by saying, “We were like sitting with criminals at the same table.”
The file, known as a Canadian application for encrypted communication, came to light as of March 2021.
In parallel, Belgium and France announced a decisive blow to drug smuggling gangs due mainly to being able to decipher the code of this application, which is a technical achievement in which Dutch investigators contributed, and made it possible, during the past months, to dismantle a huge cocaine smuggling network whose members are distributed between Dubai and various parts of Europe.
The police arrested 48 people in Belgium after nearly 200 raids, in a process that was the culmination of an analysis of hundreds of millions of emails, and the product of work that spanned many years on March 9, 2021.
The police indicated at the time that the peak of the smuggling cartel’s activity was in the vicinity of Antwerp, the European entry point for cocaine coming from South America. In 2022, the security forces seized approximately 110 tons of this substance, setting a new record.
The French judiciary also had a role in the process, as it opened an investigation since 2019 into this “undeclared” communication system, given that its technical servers were in France.
More than two years later, the French and Belgians are talking about “before and after Sky ECC” in the fight against drug trafficking in Europe.
More than a billion messages.
The operation was based on a massive amount of information “more than a billion messages”, the head of the Belgian Federal Judicial Police, Eric Snoeck, confirmed to AFP.
“We used a relatively small part of the information available… This is a work in progress and it takes years” to complete it, he added.
Since March 2021, about 1,400 people have been arrested for questioning in Belgium and 511 judicial investigations have been opened or provided with data from Sky ECC, according to official figures.
In late November, Europol revealed that encrypted messages had enabled the dismantling of a “supercartel” that held a third of Europe’s cocaine operations. 49 suspects were arrested in five countries, including six drug “barons” in Dubai.
Half of the investigations in Belgium are linked to the Public Prosecution Office in Antwerp.
Prime Minister Alexandre de Croo said in September that the city overlooking the North Sea is the most prominent in this case, but that “organized crime spreads in various regions of the country,” announcing the strengthening of the specialized investigative agencies.
The study of encrypted messages made it possible to reach a first conclusion revealing the extent of violence adopted by criminal organizations.
Prosecutor at the Court of Appeal in Paris, Remy Heitz, said that the organizations “brought into Europe actions that we thought were limited to South America … intimidation, assassinations, executing people directly in front of happy spectators. This is how smuggling operations are managed.”
‘Unprecedented’ violence
Snoek speaks of “an absolutely unprecedented level of violence”, pointing, for example, to the finding of containers in torture halls in the Netherlands.
He explains, “For the sake of a few thousand euros, they sometimes do not hesitate to kill people … who were cooperating with them a few hours ago, just because they did not adhere to what was agreed upon, after hours of torture,” considering that “this matter raises chills.”
And reading the messages through the encrypted application made it possible to locate a “house of terror” near the Serbian capital, Belgrade, in which the victims were dismembered before their remains were put in a meat grinder.
The Balkans region is one of the most prominent stations on the map of international smuggling, as is the case in Dubai, where many leaders of smuggling gangs have taken refuge. The investigators noted that the Albanian language is the second most used language on the Sky ECC app, after English.
The data discovered through the application were shared with at least 22 countries, including countries in Latin America where drug production or transit is recorded, such as Brazil and Colombia.
In addition to smugglers of Moroccan origins operating in the Netherlands, or members of the ‘Ndrangheta mafia from the Italian region of Calabria, the Sky ECC application revealed the presence of “representatives of South American cartels” in Belgium, according to Snwick.
The extent to which these networks have reached raises concern in several European countries.
A French judge said, “I am very concerned… We underestimate the risk of these smuggling operations in terms of destabilizing states and spillover of violence into society.”
