Spain’s Secretary of State for Security, Rafael Pérez, met this week with the Prime Minister of Sweden, Ulf Kristersson, to whom he explained the police coordination mechanisms in Spain and the work carried out by the Intelligence Centre against Terrorism and Organised Crime (CITCO), highlighting a case that saw drug traffickers with links to Torrevieja arrested.
The Prime Minister took advantage of his official visit to Spain to learn about CITCO’s work in the fight against terrorism and its collaboration with the Swedish police forces. In this sense, the director of the centre, Manuel Navarrete, has shared with the Swedish delegation the working model of this unit, and its police cooperation mechanisms.
Among other examples of successfully completed operations, Navarrete has exposed the case of Furniture-Candinavia, an action carried out in 2021 by a Joint Investigation Team between Spain and Sweden, set up under the protection of Eurojust and Europol and made up of agents of the National Police, Guardia Civil, and the Swedish National Operation Division (NOA).
The police intervention allowed the arrest in Spain and Sweden of 71 people who were part of a network of drug traffickers. A Swedish removal company, with offices in Torrevieja and San Pedro de Alcántara, transported the drug from Spain, hiding it in legal postage. The investigation also made it possible to dismantle the network that introduced the substances from Morocco, as well as the procedure for channelling illicit funds through luxury real estate investments.
During the meeting, Pérez and Kristersson promised to continue strengthening police cooperation between the two countries in the fight against organised crime, an effort that has made it possible to reduce the presence of Swedish citizens in criminal organisations that operate in Spain by two points in the last four years.
It is worth noting that the United Nations cited Torrevieja as having a particularly bad drug and lawlessness problem as a result, and so positive interventions and results like this go some way to repairing the global image of the town.
