Boastful “Baby” treated his Spanish jailers to a brothel before escaping; now he’s back in prison.
Spanish police have captured one of the world’s most prolific cannabis smugglers after he escaped jail with the help of prison guards in his pay.
Mohamed Taieb Ahmed, nicknamed “El Nene,” was arrested after being stopped in a sports car belonging to his brother in Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta. He was carrying false papers and police had to identify him by his fingerprints.
He is expected to be extradited to Morocco this week, more than four months after walking out of a jail in the town of Kenitra, where he had served three years of an eight-year sentence for drug trafficking and bribing civil servants.
El Nene was well known in his native Ceuta, where Arabic-speaking Muslims make up about 40 percent of the 70,000-strong population. He started out as an errand boy for drug pushers in the impoverished hillside neighborhood of Principe Alfonso, where half of Ceuta’s Muslims live. But by the age of 16 he was aiding the international drug traffickers plying the route between north Africa and southern Europe — and soon after launched his own organization.
El Nene delighted in taking video footage of his drug runs and posting it on the Internet. And when his powerful motorboats outran Civil Guard patrols as he crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, he used to lower his trousers and moon them.
El Nene is a dual citizen of Spain and Morocco and has lived between the two countries and boasted of having a multi-million-dollar fortune. The authorities estimate that about one in 10 joints smoked by Spaniards contain cannabis trafficked by his organization. The Spanish police calculate he is behind the introduction of 50 tonnes of cannabis a year into Europe through Andalucia.
Many of his millions have been laundered through luxury villas in an upmarket neighborhood near Tetuan and businesses registered in relatives’ names.
The life of luxury he bought himself in his Moroccan jail has served only to heighten his legendary status among teenage school dropouts in Ceuta hoping to become the next El Nene. Prison staff turned his cell into a luxury suite complete with a plasma TV, DVD player and laptop with Internet access in return for bribes of money, motorbikes and cars.
He regularly ordered in takeout food from some of Kenitra’s best restaurants and is even said to have been allowed out on several occasions to treat guards to free dinners and even a night in a brothel.
He disappeared from prison on Dec. 7 last year, but Moroccan authorities only discovered he was gone after an anonymous tip-off. He is believed to have re-entered Ceuta on a false passport. Eight prison workers at the jail he escaped from have been sentenced to between two months and two years in prison.
A spokesman for Spain’s National Police, who captured El Nene on Wednesday on an international arrest warrant issued by Morocco, said: “He boasted of having more millions than years of age. The prison he was being held in was supposed to be a high-security jail. But he had three cells with all kinds of luxuries including the latest high-tech equipment.”
“We believe he’s been continuing to run his drugs empire from his cell. We’ve had him under surveillance since he entered Ceuta, but we couldn’t do anything until we had the international arrest warrant in our hands,” the police source said. “He wasn’t armed when we arrested him and he didn’t put up any resistance. I simply think we caught him unawares.”
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