Spanish police have arrested 18 people in a crackdown on a criminal group that ran Europe’s largest cocaine laboratory, a high-tech multinational facility where teams of Colombian and Mexican experts worked around the clock to produce up to 200kg of the drug a day, he said. Guardian.

Spanish National Police officers, working with their counterparts in Portugal and Colombia, also seized 1,300 kg of cocaine paste and 151 kg of processed cocaine after uncovering a “megalaboratory” in Spain’s northwestern Galicia region and made a number of arrests on the mainland and on the island. Gran Canaria.

The laboratory worked 24 hours a day

“The megalaboratory, located in the province of Pontevedra, never stopped its activities, its “cooks” worked in shifts around the clock to transform the base paste into cocaine hydrochloride, ready for consumption,” the National Police said on Friday.

The now-defunct criminal organization was highly sophisticated, and its members, whose various tasks were well organized, employed strict security measures such as the use of aliases, disguised drivers, and the use of a strict communication protocol.

The investigation began last October when officers came across a criminal group based in Las Palmas, the capital of Gran Canaria, whose members were already under investigation for their links to Colombian drug suppliers.

Police investigations then led them to a house near Madrid, which the gang used as a warehouse for large quantities of chemicals, and to an industrial area in Pontevedra, where supplies for a cocaine laboratory were also stored.

Officers soon discovered a multinational criminal enterprise involving Colombian “chefs” and two Mexicans – known as “the engineer” and “the notary” – who specialized in extracting the cocaine-based paste that was hidden inside the metal cylinders of heavy machinery.