TIRANA, May 6 – Arber à‡ekaj, owner of the banana-importing company Arbi Garden whose container was transporting 613 kg of Europe-bound cocaine from Colombia back in February, was arrested on Saturday in Germany.
à‡ekaj had reportedly left the country a few days before the biggest amount of cocaine ever seized by Albanian police was discovered in Durrà«s.
He told local media he had no connection with the cocaine found in his company’s containers, and that he would voluntarily give himself up to Albanian authorities. But he never did.
According to the police report, à‡ekaj was arrested by German police in a residential area close to Dusseldorf, where he lived under a different name.
The narcotics were thought to have been part of a wider drug trafficking network which begins in Colombia, transits through Italy and Malta and then, through Albanian organized crime gangs, passes on to the European market.
At the time, police arrested two people — the driver of the Arbi Garden truck and an employee of the company — and called the operation an “undeniable success.”
Security experts say the seizures likely amount to only about 10 percent of all the drugs that manage to get trafficked through Albania.
