A Frenchman on the run for more than two years and sentenced to 20 years in prison for international drug trafficking was arrested Monday in the outskirts of Malaga, Spain, we learned Friday from the National Fugitive Search Brigade (BNRF).
"As if it were a ghost"
Jérôme Conforto, 34, had been arrested in June 2015, near Toulon, while he was transporting 500 kg of cannabis resin. Subsequently, at the option of the searches, the investigators had obtained an additional 160 kg. Released under judicial supervision in 2017, he fled and did not appear at his trial, where he was sentenced to 20 years in prison in May 2018 in Toulon.
The BNRF, which reports to the Central Office for Combating Organized Crime (OCLCO), was seized of the file in early 2019 by the Toulon prosecution. Jérôme Conforto was "the organizer of the traffic" and had "a very strong base in the high spheres of the international drug traffic", underlines one to the BNRF. "Everyone knew his name, but no one seemed to have seen it, as if it were a ghost."
Locked up pending extradition
By dint of "long investigations - 18 months - and complicated", the BNRF managed to collect information showing the possibility that he was in Malaga. Located on the Mediterranean coast, facing Morocco, the city is known as a stronghold for French drug traffickers.
In the evening of July 13, he was spotted on a street in the outskirts of Malaga before being arrested on the terrace of a cafe by Spanish police under a European arrest warrant. He was imprisoned pending his extradition to France.