6 Arrests After Major Heroin Haul In Balgoevgrad, Bulgaria

[Tchort]

The Sofia Echo

7/7/2009

A multi-national task force aimed at tackling international drug trafficking on the territory of Blagovgrad municipality led to six arrests and the seizure of more than 111kg of heroin on July 6 following the operation, Focus news reported.

The heroin's origin was Afghanistan, en route to Macedonia. It was a joint operation conducted by the Ministry of Interior's drugs branch and special branch, as well as Macedonian police, and police agencies operating in Bucharest, Romania and Istanbul.

It was revealed that after meticulous investigation and surveillance, officers confirmed that more than "100kg of heroin were held in an address on Shar Planina st in Blagoevgrad".

Late on June 6pm at 10.30pm, six individuals made an attempt to shift the cargo with two vehicles. The special police unit moved in and apprehended the 50 year old Kossovo national S.N, four Macedonian citizens, two of them with temporary Bulgarian residential permits, T.F aged 27 and D.N aged 29, M.M aged 40 and R.D aged 26 who had no permits to reside in Bulgaria and the local L.A, aged 23 from Blagoevgrad.

The men have been apprehended and a criminal case has been opened.

http://www.sofiaecho.com/2009/07/07/751276_six-arrests-after-major-heroin-haul-in-blagoevgrad

Note: For those who are interested in why this is such a big deal, I just found this excellent article the other day concerning the Kosovo Taliban connection, written before 9/11.

Here is the beginning of the article:

KLA and Drugs:
The `New Colombia of Europe'
Grows in Balkans

by Umberto Pascali
A large black spot, like ink on a piece of blotting paper, is spreading across the map of Europe. At this very moment, Kosovo, Albania, and a large part of the Balkans have been swallowed up, and tentacles are stretching out across the Black Sea, through the Caucasus, to merge with another such spot centered around Afghanistan. The "spot" does not respect national borders or ideological, ethnic, or religious differences, it just keeps spreading, bringing misery and destruction—on which it thrives. The "spot" is what was, until recently, labelled as the "black economy," or "illegal economy," or organized crime. In fact, it is a much more pervasive and totalitarian phenomenon. It represents the creation of a new perverse form of society: a modern form of feudal anarchy.

We are no longer facing societies penetrated by or hosting the parasitical "black economy"; we are facing societies dominated by it in every aspect. We are facing entities that, by virtue of this perverse system, are financially and otherwise more powerful than nation-states in the region. Such entities are not "passive"; on the contrary, they are extremely aggressive, and by their nature, expansionist. As in the metaphor of the she-wolf in Dante's Divine Comedy, "after eating, [they] are hungrier than before." Almost by their nature, they are based on, and at the same time spread a violent, artificial, fanatical ideology. And, on that basis, they secrete ferociously chauvinist, paramilitary formations, not much different in their belief structure, mutatis mutandis, from the youth recruited and trained by the Nazi or Fascist movements.

Of course, this kind of phenomenon is not new in history. It was widespread, for example, in Europe during the Thirty Years War, or earlier, during the collapse of the Roman Empire. The emergence of the nation-state rolled back feudal anarchy. The difference in its resurgence today, is that it is not spontaneous, but rather, it is sponsored and protected.

'National Security' Drug-Running
In general, the official justification for support for such groups, is that a particular group, even if devoted to criminal activities, "must" be supported, on behalf of some higher necessity, often "national security." This was the justification for the support by British and U.S. agencies to the Afghan mujahideen after the 1979 Soviet invasion of that country; as for that given to the Nicaraguan Contras. Both groups financed themselves, and a much bigger structure, with a huge traffic in cocaine, in the case of the Contras, and opium/heroin in the case of the Afghanistan "freedom fighters." This was tolerated, or even aided, by Western agencies.

In Afghanistan, the production of opium under the present Taliban regime has continued to expand, and, as we shall see, presently the main axis controlling more than 80% of the heroin market in Europe (plus a growing slice of the heroin market in other areas, including the United States) is the Afghanistan-Kosovo axis. Or better, a Taliban-Kosovo Liberation Army axis.

One of the targets of the Taliban machine in Asia is the Russian province of Chechnya. Here, a fundamentalist "freedom fighter" organization, heavily financed and armed, has been trying to repeat the Afghan enterprise of the 1980s. The model is the same: "Western" support; terrorism, use of organized crime and drug trafficking, forced recruitment; and violent imposition of feudal loyalty on the population on behalf of a cult-like fundamentalism.

Besides Chechnya, basically all of the southern region of Russia and almost all of the former Soviet states have been affected by growing terrorist movements with an Islamic fundamentalist façade, all easily traceable to the Taliban and their puppet-masters.

On May 8, during the commemoration of Victory Day, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not hesitate to compare the danger of this growing terrorist machine feeding on drug trafficking, to Fascism and Nazism. He denounced the peculiar variety of armed radicalism unleashed in southern Russia, stating that "fascism is only one example of extreme radicalism. At the end of the 1930s, Europe and the U.S. could not unite to prevent the Hitlerian aggression, and they paid a heavy price."

Of course, this destabilizing strategy coincides to the millimeter with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, et al.'s "Arc of Crisis" policy, that advocates an explosion of the Muslim areas from South Asia to the Balkans, to be unleashed against the "north" in an artificially triggered "Clash of Civilizations." Leaders in many Muslim countries are disgusted at the support the Taliban receive from the West, including the extreme ease with which the regime is able to procure any weapons system imaginable, while a policy of de facto or de jure embargo, deprives many other Muslim countries from procuring even the minimum of technology.

The Taliban-KLA Axis
On March 18, while his country was in the middle of fending off a ferocious and well-organized assault by the Kosovo Liberation Army aimed at provoking a bloody ethnic confrontation between Macedonians and ethnic Albanians, Macedonia's Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski launched a dramatic appeal to the nation. "It is obvious that the international community cannot run away from the fact that this time we are dealing with the creation of a new Taliban by the Western democracies within Europe," he said. In a moment of existential danger for his country, the Prime Minister put his finger in the wound. He indicated in clear terms what was behind the well-armed, well-trained, and well-financed gangs that had invaded his country, using as their base a Kosovo province solidly under the control of NATO's Kosovo Forces (KFOR).

"It the same old story. Ten [twenty—ed.] years ago we were arming and equipping the worst elements of the mujahideen in Afghanistan—drug traffickers, arms smugglers, anti-American terrorists," said Michael Levine, former U.S. counter-narcotic agent and one of the most decorated agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), in May 1999. "We later paid the price when the World Trade Center was bombed, and we learned that some of those responsible had been trained by us. Now we're doing the same thing with the KLA, which is tied in with every known Middle and Far Eastern drug cartel. Interpol, Europol, and nearly every European intelligence and counter-narcotics agency has files open on drug syndicates that lead right to the KLA, and right to Albanian gangs in this country."

Levine explained that "my contacts within the DEA are, quite frankly, terrified, but there's not much they can say without risking their job. The Albanian mob is a scary operation. In fact, the Mafia relied on Albanian hit-men to carry out a lot of their contracts.... And now, according to my sources in drug enforcement, they are politically protected."

A good method to track down the cancerous growth of the "black spot" is to look at the traffic of illegal drugs, heroin in particular. Almost all of the heroin circulating in Europe comes through the Balkans. It is mostly produced from opium cultivated in the Taliban-dominated Afghanistan and refined in Turkey. It is distributed mostly by the so-called "Kosovo mafia," whose military excrescence is known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) or the Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves (UCK), operating inside Serbia as the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja, and Bujanovac (UCPMB), and in Macedonia as the National Liberation Army (UCK).

Before we look in some detail at the nightmarish history of the KLA, let's establish some basic points concerning Afghanistan and the Taliban. It makes the KLA exploit much clearer.

Who are the Taliban? The word talib means religious student in Arabic, for which taliban is the plural. These were originally young boys and teenagers escaping or forced out of Afghanistan (under Soviet domination) and set up in refugee camps just across the border in Pakistan. The youth were indoctrinated in the most brutal and fanatic way. They became, billions of U.S. and European dollars of weapons aid and years of warfare later, the leadership of the country, imposing one of the most obscurantist and repressive regimes in recent history. And now, Afghanistan has become a center for training and organizing terrorist groups to be unleashed against neighboring countries. It has consolidated its control over opium production, and thus, the Taliban enjoy an inexhaustible financial reserve to pursue their aims.

The Taliban have come up a long way on the ladder of international organized crime activity, and many observers believe that such an escalation in such a strategic and controlled area of the world could not have happened by chance. Many point out that the leader of the mujahideen who went to fight in Afghanistan, under the sponsorship of Western agencies, was Osama bin Laden—the scion of a prominent Saudi family, who is now the most wanted terrorist in history. (See also "Foreign-Backed Taliban Armies Threaten Central Asia," EIR, Sept. 8, 2000.)

Rest of the article can be read here:

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2001/2824_kla_drugs.html

This news article is important, as it shows how alive and well the Albanian Connection is, despite 9/11, and 8 years of fighting against the Afghan and now Pakistani Taliban.

 

[CokeMonger]

My best friend is from Sofia (Bulgaria) and told me once that Bulgaria was the central hub of heroin trafficking in Europe. Guess he wasn't bragging.

BTW, he says 100 Euros ($175?) buys an ounce of pure over there. But, get caught at the airport and you're facing the death penalty, so it all evens out.