Spanish authorities have released Firas Taghi, a relative of the Moroccan-Dutch mafia leader Ridouan Taghi and considered the second-in-command of the organization, due to a procedural error by the police.
Firas, a cousin of Ridouan Taghi, was awaiting extradition to the Netherlands based on a European arrest warrant issued in August 2025.
According to “El Español,” police exceeded the legal deadlines for executing Taghi’s extradition, leading to the cancellation of his detention order and allowing him to leave prison.
Firas Taghi is regarded by drug trafficking experts as the actual second-in-command of an organization considered one of the most dangerous criminal networks in Europe. He was arrested last summer in Algeciras during a large-scale international operation targeting cocaine smuggling through the port of Antwerp.
After the decision to extradite him to the Netherlands became final on August 7, 2025, the “SIRENE Spain” office, which manages alerts in the Schengen Information System, was informed to carry out the extradition. However, according to the judicial decision, the extradition was not executed within the maximum ten-day timeframe, without any justification recorded.
This is not the first such error. In April 2024, Karim Bouijrihan, another leader in the Moroccan-Dutch mafia, exploited a similar mistake to secure his release and subsequently fled Spain. An investigation by the Judicial Council’s inspection body at that time concluded that there was no coordination failure among judicial authorities but noted “unexplained failures,” including the failure to execute Bouijrihan’s extradition immediately.
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