On August 10, the Basic Criminal Court in Skopje sentenced two men, Dragan Stojanov and Aleksandar Ivanovski, to three-and-a-half and three years and eight months imprisonment respectively.
Both men had admitted their roles in transporting marijuana from North Macedonia to Serbia.
Ivanovski drove the trucks, while Stojanov admitted getting hold of some of the vehicles and driving alongside Ivanovski – who admitted when he signed his plea deal that he set the truck on fire.
Preparations for the January shipment began as early as November the previous year.
At that time, Alfapharm procured a total of 8,832 kilograms of dried cannabis flower from CBD Med Plant, based in the southwestern town of Strumica, North Macedonia.
According to the court verdict, this quantity was not intended for legal processing but had been contracted and financed in advance for unauthorised sale.
In December, employees at Alfapharm’s premises in North Macedonia’s capital Skopje spent almost two weeks packing the drugs into double vacuum packages of a kilogram each and loading cardboard boxes with ten packages each.
More than 200 boxes bore markings indicating the cannabis strains. Once the packing was completed, on December 15, the employees were sent on collective leave.
In early January, the drugs were loaded into several vehicles, driven some 60 km outside Skopje, and transferred to a truck. The truck had already passed customs and was supposedly carrying sealed textile goods.
The truck, followed by the other vehicles, crossed into Serbia shortly after midnight. It left the highway at 3.41 a.m. and stopped in Konjuh, where the drugs were unloaded. Some 100 kgs were sent on to Belgrade, where they were discovered by police and seized.
Five days later, police came for the rest. In the house and outbuildings in Konjuh, more than 4.9 tonnes of marijuana were found in hundreds of cardboard boxes.
