2024-04-05 08:43:10
The European police authority Europol has identified 821 criminal networks that pose a particularly high threat to the EU’s internal security. These groups have a total of over 25,000 members, according to a report presented in Brussels on Friday. Half of the networks are therefore wholly or partially active in drug trafficking.
For the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, such networks represent “one of the biggest threats to our societies,” as she said when presenting the report. A third of the criminal groups have been active for over ten years, sometimes even following leading figures were arrested.
A key finding of the report is that only very few groups (18 percent) are active in multiple fields, said Europol boss Catherine de Bolle. By far the most important area is drug trafficking (295 groups that are active in this area alone). Of these, 113 groups lived exclusively from trafficking cocaine. Other important areas are fraud (125 groups), theft (63 groups) and smuggling (48 groups).
All 821 groups are active in more than one country, but three quarters have a regional focus and are active in a maximum of seven countries. The networks are also often internationally structured internally, with only 32 percent of the groups whose members all have the same nationality.
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