The Judicial Police (PJ) arrested two men and a woman in recent days at Humberto Delgado Airport in Lisbon on suspicion of drug trafficking.
In a statement, the PJ explained that the suspects “were transporting inside their bodies, from a South American country, an amount of drugs corresponding to at least 30,000 individual doses if it were to reach illegal distribution circuits.”
“The arrests occurred as part of police operations that are regularly carried out to prevent and suppress the introduction of narcotic substances into national territory,” the statement reads.
The PJ explains that the defendants, aged between 20 and 26, “were presented for their first judicial interrogation as detained suspects before the competent judicial authority, and were given the precautionary measure of preventive detention.”
“Despite the high risks to human life, criminal networks dedicated to introducing cocaine into the European continent continue to recruit human couriers, often young adults in situations of great economic and/or emotional need, to transport significant quantities of drugs inside their bodies,” the PJ says in the statement. They add that these networks lure young people “with large sums of money and, at the same time, with false information about the actual risks they will face, including to their lives.”
