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SPANISH police have put the brakes on the Costa del Sol’s spiralling mafia activity with a huge operation targeting a number of interconnecting mafia gangs that formed a French-led ‘super mafia’.
55 arrests have taken place in the last month following a series armed raids in homes and properties across dozens of towns from Estepona and Marbella to Mijas and the capital.
The police kicked down doors far beyond the coast, stretching inland to Ronda, Antequera, Alhaurín el Grande and Cártama, where stash houses and safe properties were uncovered, and even north to Jaén and Barcelona.
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Police say that most of the people arrested were French citizens, but they also claim to have had Moroccan and Eastern European accomplices as drivers and couriers.
The gangs used the villas on the coast, as well as warehouses and residential estates that were quiet, to act like logistics hubs. They blended into the locals and tourists, while smuggling drugs up north, towards France and northern Europe.
The detectives soon realized that the same vehicles, names and hiding places were appearing in nine different investigations.
A kidnap gang in Marbella turned out to be connected to gunmen in Benalmádena, while the weapons seized in Estepona matched those used in a daylight shooting in Malaga city.
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As the cases overlapped, a pattern emerged – a web of French-run crews moving drugs, weapons and hitmen along the Costa del Sol’s criminal corridor.
In Marbella, a Moroccan man was snatched outside a restaurant in October 2024 and held for several days before being freed in Torre de Benagalbón, near Rincon de la Victoria.
Two months later the same network attempted to assassinate a pair of Swedish men in Benalmadena by spraying bullets into their ride-hail vehicle from a pistol and submachine gun.
The victims jumped down 30 meters before firefighters pulled them up.
In a luxury house in Estepona, a raid revealed a cache of weapons, including pistols and assault rifles.
A second crew from the same organization staged an ambush at a Lidl store on Calle Gerona, Malaga. They shot a man two times during a failed robbery.
In Estepona, officers seized 14 more weapons – three of them assault rifles – used in violent ‘stick-ups’, armed robberies of rival traffickers across the province.
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A truck carrying 374 kilograms of hashish, which had left an industrial warehouse under a false identity and was on its way to Madrid, was intercepted in Antequera.
In the towns of Alhaurin el Grande, and Cartama just outside Malaga were found more than three tons of hash, hidden in luxury cars. One suspect wanted for homicide in France was arrested.
Agents in Malaga’s Bailen-Miraflores district and Campanillas district unearthed 2 underground bunkers containing 170 kilograms of cocaine. They arrested the ringleader at Ronda.
In El Saucejo and Marbella, raids linked together dismantled a cell that transported assault weapons in cars with hidden compartments.
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In Barcelona, officers found 1.68 tonnes hidden in textile bales destined for northern Europe.
Together, the evidence revealed a single criminal super-structure – a French-led ‘super-cartel’ whose overlapping cells shared safe houses, armouries and smugglers from one end of the coast to the other.
Javier Salas, the government’s subdelegate for Malaga, called the operations ‘the most accurate and forceful blow against organised crime in our province in recent times’.
Malaga Police Commissioner Roberto Rodríguez Velasco added: “We will not give in. We won’t let those who disrupt peaceful coexistence get away.
“We are facing dangerous people. “They will be identified, and brought to the judicial authority at any cost.”
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However, he admitted that ‘there is still a long way to go’ in smashing the vice-like grip that organised crime has taken on the Costa del Sol in recent years.
During a press briefing at the provincial station, the police commissioner stood in front of 37 firearms. These included assault rifles and submachine guns as well as pistols.
Across the nine separate police operations they seized almost nine tonnes of drugs made up of hash and cocaine, €150,000 in cash, and 40 vehicles.
Investigators report that this group operated as a federation, consisting of overlapping crews, which cooperated with each other when necessary. They pooled weapons, vehicles and information to control the routes for drugs from Campo de Gibraltar up to northern Europe.
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Sources in the police believe that this model has allowed the gangs evade detection over the years by combining the structure of organised crime and the mobility of independent hitmen.
It was this network – the so-called French ‘super-mafia’ – that the latest wave of raids was designed to dismantle once and for all.
The raids formed part of Spain’s national ‘Plan Costa del Sol’, a year-old strategy to dismantle foreign-led mafias operating along the southern coast.
The plan has resulted in more than 600 arrests and the seizure of 70 tonnes of marijuana, 5.2 tonnes cocaine, 170 weapons, and 70 tonnes of hashish over the last year.
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