PRAGUE, June 12 (Xinhua) -- The Czech National Anti-drug Center (NPC) has detained and accused 60 people of smuggling several hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and heroin to Australia, said NPC director Jakub Frydrych at a press conference on Tuesday.
The smugglers face 10 to 18 years in jail.
The local organisers hired indebted or low-income Czechs as couriers. The drug dealers used their own travel agency that planned individual holiday stays for the couriers, who departed from Prague via the U.S or Thailand to Australia. The chief organiser and five of his closest aides who hired couriers and secured the logistics of the criminal transactions are among the accused, said Frydrych.
He said that within a trip, a pair of couriers smuggled 20 kilograms of drugs. In two years, this group organized at least 38 trips and smuggled 780 kilograms of drugs.
The NPC cooperated on the investigation of the case with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Australian Federal Police. After the detention of the first Czech couriers, the U.S. and Australian authorities started investigating the case as organized crime.
The first couriers were detained by the Australian police at the Sydney airport in 2016 and some were sentenced to seven to nine years in prison. In the U.S., the case began to unfold at the Las Vegas airport where two Czech couriers were detained.
The gang smuggled drugs to Australia and partly to New Zealand, the final price of the drugs is up to 18 times higher than in Europe. The globally organized gang might have earned astronomic sums, an equivalent of dozens of billions of Czech crowns, said Frydrych.
The case in the Czech Republic is supervised by the Regional Public Prosecutor's Office in Ceske Budejovice. The main organizers are being prosecuted.
