Germany-led raid targets Europe-wide drug trafficking network

German, Spanish and Austrian investigators carried out a coordinated crackdown on a suspected Europe-wide drug trafficking network that prosecutors say was run from North Rhine-Westphalia. Acting for the Cologne public prosecutor’s office, police searched 31 private homes, business premises and hiding places and executed nine arrest warrants against suspects aged 24 to 31.

The investigation has widened beyond the first arrests. Cologne prosecutors said 31 suspects are now in investigators’ sights, and they believe leading members of the group orchestrated a cross-border trafficking operation over a number of years. Authorities estimate the transactions tied to the network were worth more than €11 million, a scale that points to a structured criminal business rather than an ad hoc smuggling ring.

Investigators documented more than 4 metric tons of cannabis, more than 27 kilograms of cocaine, around 1.5 kilograms of crack cocaine and about 800 liters of amphetamine oil. Prosecutors said that amount of amphetamine oil alone would have been enough to produce more than 3 tons of amphetamine, underscoring the industrial scale of the alleged operation.

The case also highlights how traffickers exploit the EU’s open borders and fragmented enforcement landscape. The Cologne public prosecutor’s office said the probe involved Europol along with investigative authorities in Spain and Austria, showing how much coordination was needed to dismantle a network that moved product, money and logistics across several jurisdictions. Europol says drug trafficking remains a highly profitable and increasingly complex business for organised crime groups in Europe, and that it supports raids through criminal-intelligence analysis and operational assistance.

Europol has also previously described how criminal groups use handling centres in Germany and other EU countries to distribute cocaine across Europe once shipments enter the bloc. That pattern fits the prosecutors’ description of a network with storage, transport and distribution links spread across borders, and it reinforces the continuing role of western Germany as a key transit and coordination point for organised crime. The arrests in this case may be only one piece of a wider structure that investigators say operated for years.