This is how the drug trafficking network to which Edwin Congo allegedly belonged worked

The former Colombian soccer player was arrested in Spain for allegedly having a “direct line” with members of the organization and establishing “contacts and connections between them.”

The Spanish police announced on Wednesday the dismantling of an alleged drug trafficking network that hid the drug by mixing it in cardboard boxes, an operation in which they detained a former Maradona doctor and former Colombian soccer player Edwin Congo.

The investigation began around the Colombian doctor Mauricio Vergara, known in his time for having assisted the Argentine soccer player Diego Maradona in a weight loss program and arrested in 2002 in his native country for drug trafficking.

Nicknamed “the little doctor”, Vergara had “an aesthetic clinic in Madrid that they used as an operations center,” said a source from the National Police, who led this investigation, in which 18 people were arrested in Spain, Colombia, the Netherlands and Bulgaria.

Investigating Vergara’s “illicit activities”, agents discovered that this network exported cocaine from Colombia by mixing it, in small quantities not exceeding 100 grams, with the sheets of the cardboard cardboard boxes, the police said in a statement.

During the creation phase of the boxes, their sheets were impregnated with cocaine in such a way that one material was not distinguished from another and, once it arrived in Europe, it was recovered “in its own laboratories through complex chemical processes”.

(When drugs and tragedy were related to Colombian soccer players)

In January, agents seized a ton of cocaine in Bulgaria hidden in more than 6,600 boxes of a shipment of limes and pineapples that had landed in Greece from Colombia. In images provided by the police, it is seen how a machine shreds the cardboard boxes and then the dough is pressed into another container, from which the drug that had been mixed in them is extracted.

Colombian former Real Madrid soccer player Edwin Congo was also detained in the operation, and was released after testifying. “I am innocent, I have done absolutely nothing that has to do with the sale or manufacture or anything that has to do with cocaine,” Congo told Spanish television La Sexta, where he acknowledged doing business with emeralds with some of the people involved in this network.

The operation, carried out in coordination with the Colombian, Bulgarian and Dutch police, allowed the confiscation in the Netherlands “of 1,200 kilos of pressed cardboard and more than 1,000 liters of chemicals necessary for the extraction of cocaine,” the statement said.

Twenty people were arrested in the operation and according to El País de España, a police source reported that Congo, “although he is not one of the important men in the group, he did have a direct line with the two main detainees and participated in the organization, establishing contacts and connections between them ”.