Daniel Kinahan’s drug cartel has been channelling huge quantities of narcotics through African countries from South America, a new report has revealed.
The study discovered that the shipments are on a much bigger scale than previously believed.
The report compiled by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) scrutinised the drug market in 16 countries.
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It found both substantial local consumption and expanding transit flows to Europe and Australia from South America.
The documents state the cocaine shipments are mostly sent in containers from the port of Santos in Brazil as well as from a stream of human carriers.
Instead of being smuggled directly to Europe most of the shipments reach coastal African countries including South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya and Tanzania, before either being transhipped to other overseas destinations or through Africa.
The report states: “The result is a blooming drug trade whose full scale is hidden by feeble interdiction capacities.
“West and north Africa are the continent’s more famous cocaine corridors, yet given their much higher enforcement profile – with French naval carriers patrolling the Gulf of Guinea – it is hard to compare based on seizure data alone.”
Last summer, it emerged the Kinahan cartel was moving cocaine across the continent in air ambulances and Christy Kinahan Snr was planning to take full control of the drug transit routes through the African continent.
In September, the Irish Sunday Mirror also revealed Christy Kinahan hoped to buy a fleet of at least nine planes from the Egyptian Air Force to transport drugs around Africa.
If he had been successful it would have made him one of the world’s leading drug lords on a par with the dons who control Mexican and Colombian cartels.
The report also highlights how “cocaine traffickers are despatching regular, large-scale consignments to various countries in the region”.
It added: “The cocaine is often concealed in or among a shipment of licit goods, either as a directly designed shipment of contaminated cargo or in a rip on/rip off arrangement where the container seals are broken and replaced fraudulently.
“Sometimes the cocaine is concealed inside the container housing itself.”
Christy Kinahan Snr is understood to have been in Zimbabwe as recently as March or April last year – just before the US announced financial sanctions on him and his sons and four other associates.
At the same time the FBI placed a €4.7million bounty on their heads while the authorities in the United Arab Emirates, where he was based, announced sanctions against the cartel’s bosses.
It is unclear where Christy Kinahan and his two sons Daniel and Christy jr are hiding out.
However, in recent months the Garda Commissioner Drew Harris revealed the net is closing in on the the heads of the crime organisation who are likely to be arrested abroad.
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