Exclusive: Guardian investigation reveals white powder is linking hundreds of vulnerable African minors to brutal gangs
Beatings and torture: North African children pay a bloody price for Europe’s insatiable appetite for cocaine
A Guardian investigation has found that hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children across Europe are being forced to serve as soldiers for increasingly powerful drug gangs to satisfy the continent’s growing appetite for cocaine.
EU police forces have warned of industrial-scale exploitation of African children by cocaine networks operating in cities across western Europe, including Paris and Brussels, as they seek to expand Europe’s £10 billion cocaine market.
Child protection agencies have warned that cocaine gangs, exploiting an “unlimited” supply of vulnerable African children, are using brutal methods to control their victims, including torture and rape when they fail to sell enough of the drug.
Sources told The Guardian that police have recently found a number of Moroccan and Algerian children who appear to have been tortured and believe they were smuggled into the country by cocaine gangs, with London likely to be next.
Concern about the level of exploitation was so high that EU police forces – along with UK, UN and Europol agencies – met in March to discuss how to tackle the exploitation and trafficking of African children by drug networks based in western Europe.
A separate recent assessment by EU police forces investigating serious organised crime and human trafficking concluded: “Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and France have presented several concrete cases of exploitation of hundreds of minors from North Africa who have been recruited into drug trafficking networks to sell drugs.”
Other sources believe the real number could be in the thousands, with the latest police data showing that 15,928 unaccompanied children arrived in Europe in 2022, many of whom later went missing.
A recent document released by the Belgian Federal Police for Europol states: “Thousands of unaccompanied foreign minors cross EU borders each year, disappearing without a trace, many of them ‘caught’ by criminal circles for exploitation, which adds to their trauma.
Eric Gerber, head of the human trafficking and smuggling department of the Belgian Federal Judicial Police, is one of the officials leading efforts to address the exploitation of unaccompanied children by criminal networks. “For African minors, particularly Moroccan and Algerian minors, the most important area is exploitation by organised crime groups involved in criminal activities such as drug trafficking,” he said.
“In the EU we have unstoppable low-cost human resources coming from Africa.”
Police cite the Moroccan “Mocro Mafia” group as the main exploiter of children. The organisation includes several of Europe’s largest cocaine trafficking gangs, working directly with producers in South America. The group is believed to be active in the Belgian port of Antwerp, the main entry for cocaine into Europe The Mocro mafia is renowned for its brutality, issuing threats to the Belgian justice minister and the Dutch crown prince in the Netherlands. Earlier this year, several of its members involved in a series of mass murders were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Police have evidence that children are being trafficked into cocaine networks directly from Morocco to Europe, many of whom are lured through social media and promises of a better life.
“The Morocco mafia realises it has unlimited human resources in its country of origin,” Garber said.
Flemish child rights commissioner Caroline Frijns said African children are the “most vulnerable” in Europe and called on authorities to take urgent action to address the issue.
