By AML Intelligence Correspondents
ONE OF EUROPE’S top money launderers is at large after being released on bail by a Spanish court in what’s being described as a judicial “fiasco.”
Karim Bouyakhrichan – one of Europol’s Most Wanted – was due to be extradited to the Netherlands on money laundering, organised crime and drugs charges.
He is accused of buying 172 properties in Spain worth more than €50M to launder the gains of drug trafficking operations in Malaga, Barcelona, Melilla and Marbella.
Bouyakhrichan (46) is believed to have fled from Spain to Morocco using the fast boats which the gangs traffic cannabis and cocaine into Europe from North Africa.
He was only captured in January in Marbella on suspicion of drug trafficking and money laundering in the country. Police seized €3M in that operation.
“What was initially a great success for the Spanish police has turned into a fiasco due to a judicial error,” reported El Pais.
A member of the notorious Dutch “Mocro Mafia”, of drug crime gangs of Moroccan origin, he was released by a local court in Malaga after paying only €50,000 in bail, in an apparent oversight.
“It is worrying news,” Félix Bolaños, the Spanish justice minister said this week. “I can’t comment on any court decisions, but I do trust that the state security forces will bring this person to justice as soon as possible.”
Vincent Veenman, a spokesman at the Dutch public prosecutor’s office in The Hague, said it was “unknown” why Bouyakhrichan had not been detained pending his extradition.
“We are currently awaiting a decision on the extradition request,” he said. “The man is suspected of large-scale trafficking in hard and soft drugs.”
Since 2018, Spanish and Dutch police had been hunting Bouyakhrichan, known in underworld circles as “Taxi”, the overlord of a large gang he took over from his brother Samir “Scarface” Bouyakhrichan.
Samir was murdered in 2014 on the orders of Ridouan Taghi, the main Dutch drug mafia boss who is serving life in prison, working with a Chilean, Richard Eduardo Riquelme Vega, known as “Rico” and Raffaele Imperiale, a senior figure in the Italian Camorra mafia.
The murder led to a gang war that has continued to the present day and Bouyakhrichan was warned by Spanish judges that he was on a Taghi death list.
Intercepted and decrypted messages showed that he was to be killed in Dubai by knife-wielding “ninjas” hired by Taghi, 46, who was convicted of a series of gangland killings, including of crown witnesses and a Dutch prosecutor.
“Encrypted conversations showed that the murder gang of Taghi, Rico the Chilean and Raffaele Imperiale were fanatically hunting [Bouyakhrichan]. They consider him an arch-enemy and planned an attack,” John van den Heuvel, an expert on the Dutch mafia, wrote in De Telegraaf.
Taghi is widely regarded as being behind the assassination of Pieter De Vries, a prominent Dutch journalist and justice campaigner who was gunned down on a street in Amsterdam in 2021.
In 2022 his gang was suspected of plotting against the Dutch crown princess, as well as the NL’s PM Mark Rutte. The princess, 20, subsequently moved to study in Madrid for more than a year over fears for her safety, it emerged last week.
Earlier this month King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, thanked King Felipe of Spain for giving his daughter Catharina-Amalia safe haven in the Spanish capital, the crown princess after threats from drug crime gangs. The royal palace in Madrid is the biggest in Europe and the city is also judged one of the safest in Europe with a strong police presence.
Madrid lost out to Frankfurt in the race to host the new European Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) earlier this year.
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