Nespresso Cocaine Traffickers Get 15 Years In Prison

The Criminal Court of Basel-Country handed out the jail terms after the trio had tried unsuccessfully to retreive the drugs in the Swiss canton in 2022.

In its verdict handed down on Thursday, the court largely followed the indictment delivered on January 21 during the trial.

+ Read how detectives followed a cocaine trail from a Nespresso plant

Prosecutors had demanded partially heavier sentences of 15 years, 17 years and two months and 19 years and four months imprisonment for the three Albanian defendants. The defence had sought their acquittal, contesting the weight of the evidence.

The judges found the defendants guilty of violating the law on narcotics. They also ordered their expulsion from Switzerland for 15 years.

According to the indictment, the men, aged 31, 32 and 34, tried on three occasions to recover cocaine stored at a Swiss transfer terminal in a container filled with coffee. The container had arrived in Switzerland from Brazil via Antwerp.

It was finally delivered to the Nespresso factory in Romont, Switzerland, where the cocaine was discovered.

“This is the second-largest cocaine seizure ever made in Switzerland”, said the presiding judge in handing down the verdict. This delivery could have endangered many people, she added. The quantity of drugs alone gave the court the right to impose up to 20 years' imprisonment.

However, the judges lowered the penalty, because the trio had not achieved their objective. They had not realised that the container had been loaded onto a freight train bound for Romont.

In its decision, the Court validated a number of pieces of evidence, including the locations of the defendants' telephones, images recorded by a thermal imaging camera and by a service station surveillance camera, as well as radar images.

On this basis, it was able to pinpoint the movements of the three men and concluded that all three had participated in the search for cocaine on the Swiss terminal site.

Prior to this failed operation, one of the three had travelled to Antwerp, probably in an attempt to intercept the container that had arrived from Brazil. He was unable to do so for unknown reasons. The trio's search of the Swiss terminal was therefore plan B.

The police succeeded in arresting one of the traffickers who was trying to escape by crawling under a stationary train. He told police he was a“tourist”. His two accomplices were arrested later.“They were never able to explain to the investigators what they were doing there in the middle of the night on several occasions,” observed the presiding judge.

The location data on one of the phones, registered in Italy, was a point of debate during the trial. The data had been seized by the Italian judicial authorities. The defence argued that the data could not be used as evidence.

The court rejected this objection. According to clarifications made to the Milan public prosecutor's office, the surveillance measures had been authorised by a judge and were therefore in accordance with the law.

Moreover, this evidence was not decisive in the present case. In the judge's view, it merely reinforced the value of the evidence found in Switzerland.

Translated from French by AI/mga