Five men have been indicted after French police in the city of Angers made a record seizure of cannabis in the city from a drugs network operating out of local shisha bars.
The arrests of the five men occurred in December of last year but they were only brought before a judge and indicted this week for their alleged involvement in drug trafficking, Ouest France reports.
Police discovered a record 2.5 tonnes of illegal cannabis in December, packed into around 80 suitcases and kept in the trailer of a rented truck.
Prior to the discovery, police investigators had been tracking Kamel Yousfi, believed to be the ringleader behind the drug network, for several months.
Investigators were able to intercept phone traffic from Yousfi which revealed constant trips to various French cities including Brest, Paris and La Rochelle as well as trips overseas to Morocco and Spain.
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All five of those indicted int he case were connected to various shisha bars across the city of Angers, with Yousfi being the proprietor of his own bar.
While the suspected leader of the network has largely remained silent about his involvement, one of the other suspects claimed that he thought the suitcases full of cannabis stored in the rental van were actually scented tobacco.
Shisha bars have been linked to other gang-related activity in several other countries in Europe including in the Netherlands where gang members left the decapitated head of one of their rivals on a street in Amsterdam with the victim’s eyes pointing to a shisha bar linked to North African gangs.
Only two years prior to the shocking incident, another person had been shot in the vicinity of the same shisha bar.
A shisha bar in the Swedish multicultural city of Malmö was also the scene for a particularly brutal gang rape attack in 2016 by two so-called “stateless refugees.”
Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com
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