Moroccan mafia
[27] Ridouan Taghi became a prominent figure within the Moroccan mafia, who had a large share in the European cocaine trade,[5] and he was also responsible for a lot of gangland killings across Europe.
[29] His right-hand man Saïd Razzouki was arrested in Bogotá, Colombia, extradited to the Netherlands and in February, 2024, was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in ten murders.
In the mid-2010s, criminal organisations were also established in southern Spain (mainly around the Costa del Sol region),[36] but also in the rest of Europe,[37] South America[38] and more recently in the United Arab Emirates.
[41] This statement came right after the beheading of Nabil Amzieb,[42] the attacks on the headquarters of Dutch news outlets De Telegraaf[43] and Panorama,[44] and the murders on journalist Martin Kok[45] and lawyer Derk Wiersum,[46][47] On 6 July 2021, the Dutch crime journalist Peter R. de Vries was shot, right after he left the studio of RTL Boulevard in Amsterdam, where he had appeared as a guest on the show.
During the 1960s, Belgium and the Netherlands, unlike other countries in Western Europe, had no North African colonial past, welcomed massive Moroccan immigration from northern Morocco to work in the mines, iron and steel industry in Wallonia.
These were also the years when Dutch Penose crime syndicates were inspiring the Moroccan community to enter the hard drug business, which would make them eventually more money than hashish.
[74] Importation of goods and drug trafficking became inseparable over time, and these activities compensated for the layoffs that affected miners, steelworkers and textile workers on a massive scale.
In this context, the old manners, habits, and the traditional codes of conduct, honor, justice, and distrust in authority were transplanted in the districts of Brussels, Amsterdam and Antwerp, where these communities were able to grow significantly, notably with the establishment of a friendly relationship with the Dutch Penose, at that time amongst some of the largest criminal organizations in Europe.
This criminal society is accustomed to money laundering, weapon trafficking and finding hideouts from Gibraltar to Amsterdam, through major metropolitan areas like Paris and Brussels.
Other than major criminal activities such as large scale drug trafficking, the investigation exposed what would be a torture chamber alongside self made prisons, which were all built in shipping containers.
[98] In a series of raids against criminal organisations in several countries in early 2021, a part of Sky's infrastructure in western Europe was dismantled, and the US Department of Justice issued an arrest warrant against the company's CEO Jean-François Eap.
[121] In September 2017, the federal police in Antwerp was sounding the alarm on the increase of cocaine trafficking in the port city, generating a parallel economy and a level of corruption that was never seen before.
However, writer and criminologist Teun Voeten published a book in 2020 called Drugs, where contradictory claims were made in anonymous interviews by Belgian inmates, and by people from certain neighborhoods in Antwerp.
[130][131] Dutch investigator Pieter Tops made an astonishing discovery in September 2018: trafficking networks in the Netherlands easily collect up to 20 billion euros through the trade of synthetic drugs such as XTC or amphetamines.
[147] Following the attack on the Dutch news outlet De Telegraaf and the murders of journalist Martin Kok and lawyer Derk Wiersum, Ridouan Taghi became the most wanted man in the Netherlands for several years, with multiple international arrest warrants in his name.
[148] Taghi's right-hand man Saïd Razzouki took refuge in Medellín, Colombia under the protection of the Oficina de Envigado and the Clan del Golfo cartel, but was later on arrested by the Colombian authorities, the FBI and the DEA.
[158] In July 2021, the most prominent Dutch crime journalist Peter R. de Vries was assassinated after he left the studio of RTL Boulevard in Amsterdam, right after he appeared on a popular TV show.
[161] De Vries acted as a close confidant to Nabil B.,[162] the crown witness in the Marengo trial whose own brother, alongside his lawyer, were assassinated by Taghi's organisation for exposing their inner workings.
[170] Bouyakhrichan was known for using his fortune to organize extravagant private parties by renting luxurious rooms in places like Dubai and Amsterdam, which included champagne, cocaine, and a lot of women and escorts.
[193] As a result of this, Houssine Ait Soussan is believed to be behind the kidnapping of Abdelkader "the Jew" Bouker, a major Belgian-Moroccan drug trafficker who worked closely together with the Israeli mafia, and went missing in 2016.
[245][246] In 2018, the Kali-team (an anti-Moroccan mafia police unit from Antwerp) discovered that the Fish Farmers were amongst the main owners of a luxury suite in the Hilton hotel near the Tangier-Ville railway station in Morocco.
[248] In 2015, the Belgian authorities dismantled the Belgian-Moroccan Banana gang (Dutch: De Bananenbende), which was led by Karim A., Nabil A. and Khalid O.H., after a seizure that contained 3.4 tonnes of cocaine in Antwerp.
[249][250][251] The Dutch government and its intelligence service AIVD claim to have "strong evidence" that Iran used Dutch-Moroccan gangsters to eliminate at least two of its "enemies of the state" on foreign soil, but also that it was actively protecting crime bosses by providing them with a safe haven.
[257] The Dutch authorities claim that he received this level of protection from the Iranian government because he was instrumental in helping Iran eliminate one or more of its most wanted "enemies of the state".
Then it became known that Motamed was really Mohammad Reza Kolahi Samadi, a member of the People's Mujahedin of Iran, who, according to Iranian authorities, was the mastermind behind the 1981 bombing of the headquarters of the Islamic Republican Party, killing over 70 officials.
[259] Dutch investigators were baffled when it became clear that the killers were working on the orders of the Dutch-Moroccan crime boss Naoufal Fassih, a close associate of Ridouan Taghi.
[261][262] A break in the murder case of Mohammad Reza Kolahi occurred when prosecutors got their hands-on text messages after they were able to unlock a decrypted cell phone from one of the participants in the plot.
A brutally murdered lawyer, the brother of a key witness killed, rocket launcher attacks on our media outlets, grenades exploding in our streets and decapitated [sic] heads in front of our coffee shops.
[279] The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf benefited greatly from the public enthusiasm for the criminal war that was taking place in its cities, which received unprecedented media coverage.
Over the years, foreign media outlets also reported on the Moroccan mafia, particularly in Germany, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Morocco and the United Kingdom.
