TIRANA, May 16 – Police have destroyed almost 30,000 marijuana plants over the course of two days this week in two separate plantations located in a village near Saranda, in southern Albania close to the border with Greece.
Police say that 15,000 plants were seedlings in small containers, whereas another 5,000 had already been planted in the ground with their length ranging between 5 and 30 centimeters.
After being uprooted the plants were burned by authorities, while police said they are working to identify the cultivators.
A day earlier in the same village, police had destroyed another 10,000 cannabis plants.
Meanwhile, police eradicated about 3,000 marijuana plants in a village in Vlora district on Tuesday.
The plants reached a height of up to 40 cm, while about 1,000 were seedlings.
After a police operation in Lazarat, nicknamed as the” weed capital of Europe” , local gangs are increasingly using plots of land in remote areas to plant cannabis. The use of parcels of land without an owner makes it difficult for police to identify the perpetrators.
Lazarat, which had been beyond the reach of law for several years was brought under control two years ago by a massive operation involving hundreds of police troops to crack down on gangs growing marijuana in the village.
The lawless village is believed to have produced 900 metric tons of cannabis per year, worth 4.5 billion euros or nearly half of the country’s GDP.
Last year, police launched another massive operation against cannabis plantations in the country’s northern remote areas where thousands of cannabis plants were destroyed.
