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Massive police crackdown in Barcelona against drug flats
BARCELONA, Oct 29, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Hundreds of police backed by a
helicopter on Monday raided dozens of apartments in central Barcelona used
for selling and consuming heroin and other drugs, making dozens of arrests.
A court in the northeastern Spanish city authorised the search of 40 flats
in the central Gotic and Raval neighbourhoods, according to a statement from
the regional judiciary administration.
About 30 people were arrested, police tweeted, in the anti-drug trafficking
operation which got underway at dawn.
Over 700 officers from Catalonia’s regional police force, the Mossos
d’Esquadra, and more than 150 officers from Barcelona’s municipal police were
involved, the two police forces said in separate tweets.
Several narrow streets in the centre of Barcelona were blocked by blue
police vans as armed officers wearing ski masks stood guard, according to an
AFP reporter at the scene.
Police removed cardboard boxes from several apartment buildings as
neighbours looked on. Some tourists snapped pictures.
Residents of the two central neighbourhoods which are popular with tourists
have long complained that empty flats, many of which are owned by banks and
investment funds following Spain’s property crash a decade ago, had been
taken over by drug traffickers as places where people come to buy and use
drugs.
They say the arrival of these so-called “narcoflats” has led to a rise in
muggings of tourists as well as local shops by addicts seeking money to buy
drugs, as well as violence between the different drug trafficking rings that
operate in the area.
A video of a man wielding a large machete in broad daylight over another
man as he lay defenceless and injured on the ground of a street in Raval made
headlines in Spain last month.
Former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who was born in Barcelona, has
made fighting crime in the city a central theme of his campaign to become the
city’s mayor in an election next year.
BSS/AFP/RY/1901 hrs