Greek Drug Chief Charged in Drug Ring

The head of an anti-drugs squad and two other police officers were among 28 people arrested in Thessaloniki, Agrinio and Volos for their suspected involvement in a drug ring, SKAI TV reported.
The report said that police and the secret service had over the last 11 months been monitoring the telephone calls of suspects linked to a ring allegedly run by Albanian drug dealers who operated at Dendopotamos of Thessaloniki, at Volos and Agrinio.
The men arrested include the head of the Volos anti-drug squad, a police officer at the foreigners’ division in Thessaloniki and another serving at an Agrinio police station. The authorities are examining the possible involvement of other police officers as well.
Evidence collected is said to show that the police officers operated as traffickers and promised drugs as gifts to associates of the dealers. They are also said to have repeatedly offered supportive testimonies to defendants in drug cases.
In July, after a 14-month probe into the activities of a prison guard suspected of smuggling drugs into a jail in Trikala, authorities said that drug-dealing rackets were rampant in correctional facilities across Greece. The newspaper Kathimerini reported that the police operation, which began in May 2011, uncovered evidence suggesting that the 43-year-old Trikala Prison guard supplied a specific inmate with narcotics, which he in turn distributed through another 30 inmates.
That same inmate allegedly set up a similar racket in Alikarnassos on Crete after being transferred to the prison there, while the Trikala guard continued his business as usual, working with a different inmate. Police said their investigation led them to rackets in the jails of Patra, Domokos, Chios and Avlona, where inmates ran dealing networks both inside and outside the prisons, using mobile phones and the Internet to coordinate their activities.