2023-12-22 17:55:00
The mega Sky ECC trial which began this Monday at the Brussels criminal court highlights the sprawling number of intermediaries who contribute to cocaine trafficking in Belgium. On the bench of 125 defendants, we find traffickers, but also lawyers or a police officer.
This is not the first time that lawyers have been suspected of complicity in drug trafficking. Latest example: last week, lawyer Sahil Malik, considered “the rising star of the Antwerp bar” was sentenced to five years in prison for his links with Albanian drug traffickers who were active at the port of Antwerp .
This 33-year-old lawyer was arrested in March 2021 during the first wave of arrests as part of Operation Sky ECC. Investigators discovered that he was collaborating with one of his clients by disclosing information regarding specific shipments of cocaine at the port of Antwerp. The lawyer went by the name “Sher” on encrypted messaging. In particular, he was in contact with customs to check whether or not specific containers had been scanned.
Sahil Malik was sentenced to five years in prison, including 20 months suspended, for “membership in a criminal organization” and “money laundering”. The court confiscated 161 thousand euros. He no longer has the right to practice.
Exonerated, lawyer Olivier Martins breaks the silence on the “ordeal” which landed him in prison: “I can look at myself in a mirror”
This is not the first time that a lawyer has been convicted in a drug trafficking complicity case. Two years ago, criminal lawyer Pol Vandemeulebroucke was sentenced to 21 months in prison. He was found to have passed confidential information to gang members. Among our Dutch neighbors, lawyer Inez Weski was also indicted for violating professional secrecy. Her preventive detention has been lifted but the 68-year-old criminal lawyer remains suspected.
Finally, it sometimes appears that lawyers themselves bring drugs into prison when they visit their clients. Thus, a lawyer in his twenties is suspected of having smuggled around thirty grams of cocaine to one of his clients, detained in Saint-Gilles prison two years ago. The drugs were discovered on the latter, during the search before his return to the cell. Recently, two lawyers were convicted of smuggling drugs into Dendermonde prison.
“Most of the violence linked to large-scale drug trafficking is linked to the cocaine market”
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