AN IRISHMAN has been arrested after trying to fly from the Costa Blanca to the UK with around €200,000 of cannabis.
The 36-year-old was held after the suitcase he had checked in for his flight from Alicante airport to Liverpool was found to contain 18 kilos of the drug.
Airport security staff alerted police that the suitcase could contain banned narcotics after passing it through an x-ray scanner.
The unnamed Irish national was held at a boarding gate after police started working on identifying and locating its owner.
He was about to board a Ryanair flight when he was pulled out of the queue and asked to open his suitcase in front of officers.
The suspect was formally arrested on suspicion of drug smuggling and drug trafficking after the vacuum-sealed bags, clumsily hidden inside among clothes, were confirmed to contain cannabis.
The Irishman was released on bail pending an ongoing criminal investigation following a first court appearance before a judge based in Elche south of Alicante.
The judge could have opted to remand him in custody but decided to grant him conditional bail instead.
The conditions are understood to include a travel ban and the obligation to sign on at court every fortnight.
It was not immediately clear today if he was travelling alone or with other people.
The man under continuing investigation declined to answer the judge’s questions and the final intended destination of the drugs found in his suitcase is not known either at this stage.
In February last year, Spanish police arrested an Irishman they accused at the time of being a “dedicated drug trafficker”.
The 36-year-old was held in the Alicante town of Rojales, in Alicante province’s Vega Baja region.
Detectives said he was part of a British-led gang that had been sending massive quantities of cannabis – amounting to hundreds of thousands of euros – to Ireland.
PREVIOUS OPERATION
In June 2023, police went public with the operation to snare three Brits and a Romanian woman as they said they had smashed a gang after intercepting parcels that had been sent from the Costa Blanca and were on their way to Ireland by post.
They had launched a manhunt for the suspected ringleader of the gang – one of the men arrested – earlier in the year after he fled officers who went to tick him off for using his mobile phone in a petrol station.
The alleged drug trafficker mistakenly thought he was about to be arrested for the serious offences he ended up being held over.
It later emerged patrol cops only intended telling him not to use his phone at the filling station near Madrid.
The Brit abandoned his vehicle with 54 kilos of marijuana buds inside and vanished after fleeing on foot and jumping over several fences restricting easy access to high-speed train lines.
He was subsequently tracked down and arrested at a hideaway on the Costa Blanca two months later.
