A Romanian court has upheld hefty prison terms handed down to two Serbian nationals last year for their roles in attempting to smuggle Brazilian cocaine into Europe through Romania.
The Court of Appeal at the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta on Thursday rejected appeals by Serbian drug traffickers, Tode Krstic and Nenad Cvetkovic. They had appealed sentences of nine years and four months they received from a court in the Danube port of Tulcea in November 2020.
The Court of Appeal said on the Romanian justice ministry’s website that it “rejected” the appeals calling them „unfounded.” It said the ruling was final.
Prosecutors said the two were part of an organized crime ring with Serbian, Spanish and Romanian nationals that was active in early 2019.
The smugglers wanted to buy “a considerable amount of cocaine, possibly from South American countries and to transport and place it for consumption in Western European states after transiting Romania,” prosecutors said.
The Serbs were arrested in March 2019, after a boat carrying at at least one ton of cocaine capsized in the Danube Delta which flows into the Black Sea. They were driving the trucks in which the shipment was to be transported across Romania and then on to Western Europe.
The arrests were made with the help of two guards at the parking lot where the drug traffickers were loading bags of cocaine that hadn’t fallen into the water.
They were suspicious of the two men and called the police after checking the content of the bags when the pair left the parking lot.
