-Caveat Lector-
July 24 1999 BALKANS
London Times
Kosovo is Mafia's 'heroin gateway to West'
FROM EVE-ANN PRENTICE IN BELGRADE
THE Kosovo conflict has turned the province into a magnet for
many of the world's notorious drug barons, according to a
director of the International Narcotics Enforcement Officers'
Association.
More than 40 per cent of the heroin reaching Western Europe comes
through the Serb province because of a lack of border controls,
says Marko Nicovic.
"Kosovo is now the Colombia of Europe. There is no border between
Kosovo and Albania or between Macedonia and Kosovo," he said
yesterday. "For the Turkish, Russian, Italian and Albanian
mafias," Kosovo really had become a paradise.
Mr Nicovic is a former Belgrade police chief and drug squad
detective who worked for years in co-operation with police in
Britain and the US. He says he began to notice Albanian gangs
dealing in drugs in the mid-1980s.
Heroin trafficking increased, he says, after Yugoslavia lost its
membership of Interpol with the imposition of international
sanctions in 1993. "Our police had great expertise and experience
with this," Mr Nicovic says. The Kosovo conflict has left the
province without police or customs controls and "Kfor soldiers
are not criminal investigators".
Mr Nicovic said drugs were being brought into Kosovo from Asia
and Turkey, then taken on to Western Europe by road and sea by
drug barons from Italy and Albania.
Mr Nicovic says many Kosovo Albanians have bought harbourside
sites in Albania in the past few years. Much of the heroin
shipped from there to small ports in southeastern Italy are run
by Italian Mafiosi. Other favourite routes are by road, north
through Serbia to Hungary, the Czech Republic and Germany, he
says.
The former Yugoslav drugs squad chief says the Albanian drugs and
arms mafia is particularly hard to penetrate. Albanians have
strong family ties and it is hard to find informers. "They have a
brotherhood which gives them a far greater ability to form a
mafia than even the Sicilians."
Mr Nicovic says hundreds of pounds of heroin are being stored in
the village of Veliki Trnovac, near Gnjiliane, in the southeast
of Kosovo, and Djakovica in the west. "The criminals have found
the one country between Asia and Europe which is not a member of
Interpol," he says.
"This is a cancer area for Europe as Western Europe will very
soon discover. As each day passes the Albanian mafia becomes
richer and more powerful."
Copyright 1999 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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Kaddish, Kaddish, Kaddish, YHVH, TZEVAOT
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Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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