Latest news with #MohamedDjeha
Times
17 hours ago
- Times
Marseilles drug police scandal has echoes of ‘French Connection' era
When the container ship OPS Hamburg docked in Marseilles on a morning in April 2023, officers from France's elite anti-drug force were lying in wait. They were sure their cunning sting would net one of Europe's biggest narco-traffickers. The US Drug Enforcement Administration had told them that buried in a container of bananas arriving from Cartagena, Colombia, there was a massive shipment of cocaine. It had been ordered by Mohamed Djeha, alias Mimo, the feared boss of Marseilles' Castellane clan. The Marseilles bureau of Ofast, the police agency created in 2020 to spearhead President Macron's war on drugs, had spent weeks setting up Operation Trident with gang informers and infiltration by undercover officers. The plan quickly unravelled. Tipped off, Mimo's men stayed away and the police found themselves guardians of 400kg of cocaine stashed in a heavily surveilled Mercedes truck in an open lorry park.
LeMonde
21-05-2025
- LeMonde
The Marseille police tried to set up a drug lord with 360 kilos of cocaine. The operation ended in total fiasco
"Imagine if an article comes out saying that Ofast [France's national anti-narcotics agency] imported narcotics into French territory and some people helped themselves (...) by selling the product through their own informants." On March 22, 2024, during a phone call with his wife, Hervé (his name has been changed) summed up, in a few words, the case that has been shaking the Marseille branch of Ofast for a year. The revelations of this 60-year-old locksmith and police reservist are at the origin of a vast investigation filled with pitfalls, legal breaches and twists. At its core: the creation of a cocaine trafficking network from scratch, informants paid in kilos of product, the handling of drugs and dirty money – all under the very lenient oversight of local anti-drug police chiefs. All of it was in the hope of a career-defining bust to take down Mohamed Djeha, aka "Mimo," one of the biggest drug traffickers in France. The Marseille police crossed one red line after the other. They thought they had cleverly turned this extraordinary and appalling case into a routine corruption one: a handful of rogue officers, a few missing blocks of drugs, "business as usual." But over the course of a more than 3,000-page case file, which Le Monde was able to review, the investigation conducted by France's internal police oversight body, the IGPN, and now under the authority of the national jurisdiction for organized crime, revealed a different reality. At the end of 2022, the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) provided Ofast with first-hand information: a shipment of several hundred kilos of cocaine was set to cross the Atlantic, hidden among two containers of bananas destined for Marseille. The Colombian exporter, operating through an import-export company, was a seasoned trafficker, well-known to American investigators.
