Eight tightly wrapped kilogram bricks sit on a table, representing what an organized crime group will smuggle into Edmonton every other day.

Along with 11 half-pound bags of marijuana, the cocaine bricks were seized during a Sunday raid of a home at 166th Avenue and 88th Street. They were displayed Wednesday afternoon at the west-Edmonton headquarters of Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team.

Police said the real coup was the arrest of a "high-ranking member" of an unnamed organized crime group. He was known to police.

"It is a bit of a coup," said Edmonton police Insp. Kevin Galvin, who is on loan to the response team.

"Generally speaking, we don't see high ranking members involved. They insulate themselves quite efficiently." Police are also looking for a second, lower ranking group member Galvin described as "influential. The cocaine bricks have an approximate wholesale value of $46,000 each, he said. Galvin described the seizure as "average," as an organized group can typically transport eight to 10 kilograms of cocaine into Edmonton every day, and on to several other communities in northern Alberta. He estimated it's less than one per cent of cocaine in the city.

"Our job is to focus on the higher level organized crime groups and their processes," said Galvin. There is no named gang affiliation with this seizure, he said, an increasingly frequent pattern. Named groups like the Crazy Dragons have given way to less structured, unnamed groups of 10 to 15 individuals who work together.

Hamid Reza Akbarpour, 24, is charged with two counts of possession for the purpose of trafficking.

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ARMED gardai investigating the activities of a major crime gang based in west Dublin have arrested a second suspect.

Detectives from the Organised Crime Unit (OCU) detained the man after raiding his house in Ballymore Eustace, Co Kildare, yesterday evening.

The suspect, who is a foreign national, was being questioned by officers last night at Naas garda station where he was being held on suspicion of possession of a firearm.

Gardai can detain the suspect without charge for up to three days.

Meanwhile, the first suspect, who was arrested by detectives after they stopped two cars outside Ballymore Eustace on Sunday night has been released without charge.

A file will now be prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions, who will determine if criminal charges should be brought against him.

Handgun

The 30-year-old man, who is from Lucan, was arrested after detectives foiled what they believed to have been an attempt to either sell or hire a handgun.

The gun was found on the roadside along with a number of rounds of ammunition, while a several thousand euro in cash was discovered in the suspect's navy BMW.

Gardai last night were still searching for the driver of a second car, a gold Toyota Avensis, which was also brought to a halt by the garda unit.

The driver of the Avensis waited until the gardai approached, then reversed his vehicle towards a ditch and suddenly drove at the OCU detectives, who were forced to jump out of the way.

Two shots were fired at the vehicle as the driver headed off in the direction of Naas.

Forensic

The cars had been under surveillance as part of an operation targeting the activities of a west Dublin gang, suspected of being involved in a series of gangland crimes, including a number of tiger kidnappings.

Forensic experts from the garda technical bureau were last night continuing to carry out checks on the BMW, which had not been stolen.

Fingerprint examinations of the weapon and cash were also made.

Ballistic tests could help determine if the gun had been used in gangland shootings.

A separate internal investigation into the firing of two shots by the gardai is under way, under the direction of a superintendent with experience in gangland and terrorism investigations.

Meanwhile, staff from the Garda Siochana Ombudsman Commission have also examined the scene of the incident on the Naas to Ballymore Eustace road

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popular resort city of Acapulco has emerged as one of the new hot spots of organized crime.

While many of Mexico’s tourist areas have remained separate from the bouts of drug violence buffeting the country, the popular resort city of Acapulco has emerged as one of the new hot spots of organized crime.


A bloody week in which more than two dozen people were killed, and five decapitated bodies were found around the city, is the latest marker of Acapulco’s decline.

As Excelsior reports, many of those murdered in the resort were taxi drivers, who often work as lookouts for one drug gang or another. On the year, 42 cab drivers have been murdered in the city, according to figures from the newspaper Reforma.

The recent wave of violence has led to a broader spike in crimes against the population in this port city, including people unconnected to organized crime.



Twenty-three local gasoline stations shut their doors for three hours on Friday to protest against increased extortion demands, while authorities reported a 20-fold rise in car robberies along the famed Autopista del Sol, or Highway of the Sun, which connects Acapulco to Mexico City. After a series of robberies on shops last week, a handful of jewelers in the city’s downtown announced a weekend shutdown to take a stand against the violence.

As of early August, 650 people had been killed in Acapulco in 2011, making it perhaps the bloodiest big city in Mexico after Juarez.

Acapulco’s body count has been strikingly high for a number of years. Last year, just over 1,000 people were killed, following 843 murders in 2009 and 724 in 2008.

As a key entryway for South American cocaine, the city has long been an attractive piece of real estate for drug gangs, with agents of the Sinaloa Cartel battling the Zetas as far back as 2005. But breakdowns in the coherence of the hegemonic networks in Mexico have transformed Acapulco from the site of a battle between two competing gangs to an anarchic mess of newer groups.

Much of the recent surge in violence stems from battles between the Independent Cartel of Acapulco (known as CIDA for its initials in Spanish), which is made up of the remains of the network run by Edgar Valdez Villarreal until his arrest in September 2010, and the South Pacific Cartel, a newly emerging gang that is loosely affiliated with the Beltran Leyvas.

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