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OLIVE PRESS
Extre-mendous
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VALENCIA / COSTA AZAHAR FREE Vol. 1 Issue 21 www.theolivepress.es September 9th - September 22nd 2021
Mafia swoop By Glenn Wickman
A GIANT operation has seen 107 suspected members of an Albanian drug gang arrested in Castellon and Catalunya. Over 400 police swooped on the gang in 42 simultaneous raids across four provinces. The members were picked up in Castellon, Tarragona, Barcelona and Girona along with a tonne of marihuana and 25,000 cannabis plants. Police have now shut down an incredible 51 isolated inland drug farms and seized €70,000 in cash as well as various cars. The raids came after a year-long operation between Albanian, German and Spanish police. An investigation was launched after a lorry carrying 140 kilos of cannabis was intercepted in Germany.
See Extremadura special inside
Brave WPC confirms she hunted for a potential ‘blonde accomplice’ of Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner on night he was last arrested in 2017
WHO IS HE? ?
ACCOMPLICE:Brueckner was out with mystery friend who vanished
Sophisticated
The family clan, which was also made up of a few Greeks and Spanish, made up to five times the price of the marijuana on sale in Spain. It helped to make them one of the biggest marijuana suppliers around Europe and one of Spain’s key mafia gangs. In a sophisticated operation they bribed estate agents to rent empty warehouses at rock bottom prices and - always - in remote areas. They also bribed electricity company employees to obtain forged documents regarding power supply, while they connected to the networks illegally. In total, they are believed to have syphoned off over €1.6 million in electricity.
VALIANT: Quick-thinking Vanessa Viera apprehended Brueckner after he flashed at kids in a play park (above)
A PLUCKY policewoman who arrested Madeleine McCann suspect Christian Brueckner in 2017 says police tried to locate a ‘blonde man’ with him that night. Off-duty officer Vanessa Viera revealed in a new book that she and her colleagues searched around the area trying to find the potential
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EXCLUSIVE accomplice. It came after she arrested dangerous sex offender Brueckner, 44, in a children’s park in Messines, on the Algarve, at 2.15am during a local fiesta. “He looked so familiar and I knew I had seen him before,” she revealed in the book, My Search for Madeleine, by Olive Press editor Jon Clarke. “It was then I realised he hadn’t come alone and I’d seen him and his friend at one of the bars in the square. “Other parents also remembered he had been chatting to another tall blonde man.” Her grilling of the German came after she was forced to hold off four angry dads of kids he had allegedly flashed at under a slide. She eventually calmed them down and managed to call in colleagues. “I asked him where his
friend was and he just smiled and wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t tell us where he was staying either.” She continued: “We searched all around for his friend, but it was clear he had completely vanished. He must have taken the car or van.”
Extradited
After being handcuffed he was taken to a police van, where her colleagues discovered there was a warrant for his arrest over sex offences in Germany. He was then taken to prison, from where he was extradited a fortnight later. The Portuguese WPC, who had been out with her five-yearold daughter that night, had been following the case closely for a decade. She had actually been stationed outside the apart-
ment at the Ocean Club, in Praia da Luz, where Madeleine, 3, had been snatched in May, 2007. And she never thought for a second that the McCanns were involved. “I saw first hand the tragedy and trauma that the poor family went through,” she reveals in the book. “It was awful. I could really see their pain and suffering.” The book tracks the sex offender’s movements since first arriving in Portugal in 1994. Apart from spending over a decade in Portugal, Brueckner spent many months living in Spain, in particular in the Granada province, near Orgiva. My Search for Madeleine, by Jon Clarke, is available on Amazon in print and e-book I’m sure he did it, Page 6