420
Founder
They looked like a real football team - with snarling coach included. But the 10 men arrested at the weekend in Spain's southern province of Cadiz were not going to play a match, despite their yellow and blue kit.
They were drug traffickers who used their footballs, knapsacks and club strips, emblazoned with the team name of a local town, Guillen Moreno CF, as a ruse to fool border police as they passed from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, in North Africa, to Algeciras, on the southern Spanish mainland, a police spokesman in Cadiz said."They were not going to play football," he said. "Their game was drugs."
The fake team would usually cross the Straits of Gibraltar into the province of Cadiz on Saturday afternoons with the hash tucked beneath their jerseys and stage a drama to enhance their credibility before border agents.
The supposed manager, 49, would carry a roster in his hand and continuously bark at the young men. "He would shout: 'Everybody pay attention, everybody stay right here!' and 'Come on, follow me!'" the Cadiz police commissioner, Jose Maria Deira, told El Mundo newspaper.
The players would cross back to Ceuta on Sundays after the fictional match and actual drug sales on the mainland. Police do not know how long the fake season lasted before a tip spurred an investigation. The game ended when officers stopped their cars in Cadiz and found a total of 16kg of hash hidden beneath the men's strips in little pellets taped to their bodies, a police spokesman said.
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Copyright: 2005 Guardian Newspapers Limited
Contact: letters@guardian.co.uk
Website: https://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/
They were drug traffickers who used their footballs, knapsacks and club strips, emblazoned with the team name of a local town, Guillen Moreno CF, as a ruse to fool border police as they passed from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, in North Africa, to Algeciras, on the southern Spanish mainland, a police spokesman in Cadiz said."They were not going to play football," he said. "Their game was drugs."
The fake team would usually cross the Straits of Gibraltar into the province of Cadiz on Saturday afternoons with the hash tucked beneath their jerseys and stage a drama to enhance their credibility before border agents.
The supposed manager, 49, would carry a roster in his hand and continuously bark at the young men. "He would shout: 'Everybody pay attention, everybody stay right here!' and 'Come on, follow me!'" the Cadiz police commissioner, Jose Maria Deira, told El Mundo newspaper.
The players would cross back to Ceuta on Sundays after the fictional match and actual drug sales on the mainland. Police do not know how long the fake season lasted before a tip spurred an investigation. The game ended when officers stopped their cars in Cadiz and found a total of 16kg of hash hidden beneath the men's strips in little pellets taped to their bodies, a police spokesman said.
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Copyright: 2005 Guardian Newspapers Limited
Contact: letters@guardian.co.uk
Website: https://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/
