The use of cocaine is increasing across much of the West, and much of its wholesale distribution is operated by Albanian groups, according to a United Nations report released earlier this year.
In the organisation’s 2023 global report on cocaine, Albanian gangs are described as being “very active” in receiving drug shipments across Western Europe. It adds that they now “exert considerable control” across the UK drug market.
In Italy, too, “Albanian-speaking groups” are listed alongside the notorious ’Ndrangheta criminal organisation, which was earlier this year the target of a major European anti-crime operation. The U.N. report notes that here, and in Ireland, where “Albanian organised crime has started establishing its presence in the country,” the growing dominance of Albanian gangs “may lead to violent clashes in future” with domestic organisations.
This is already understood to have been “driving” targeted killings in Montenegro, Serbia, and Albania since 2015. “These conflicts,” the report said,
have spilled over into some EU countries, with isolated assassinations reported in Austria, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, and Spain. It appears, however, that Balkan criminal groups employ selective violence, rather than using it in [an] indiscriminate way.
Killings may primarily impact those who choose to be involved with drug pushing, but the trade as a whole “relies,” as the report makes clear when discussing the UK drug market, “on the exploitation of vulnerable people, including young people.”
The report highlights that operations are highly professional, given that they are controlled “with a certain degree of transnational coordination, in addition to forming direct relationships with suppliers in Latin America.”
These findings follow diplomatic rows between British and Albanian officials over the illegal entry of Albanian migrants into the UK via the Channel. Around half of the total number of Channel migrants last year came from Albania despite it being a safe country, about which officials said there was “no case for routinely offering asylum to claimants.”
This prompted Dan O’Mahoney, the Clandestine Channel Threat Commander, to claim there is a “large number [of Albanian migrants] who are deliberately gaming the system” for illegal purposes. Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama last year responded furiously to UK debates on criminality linked to Channel crossings, insisting that “targeting Albanians (as some shamefully did when fighting for Brexit) as the cause of Britain’s crime and border problems makes for easy rhetoric but ignores hard fact.”
Source : European Conservative
