Antwerp police seize €16,000 and 120 cocaine packets in taxi-linked dealing cases

Antwerp police have seized about €16,000 in cash and 120 packets of cocaine after detecting suspected dealers using taxis in the city, according to Het Nieuwsblad, which reported the operations from police information. The available account establishes the seizures and the suspected use of taxis, but does not identify the taxi companies involved or show that the wider licensed taxi sector participated in the alleged dealing.

That distinction matters in a city where taxis are an everyday service for residents, visitors and late-night workers. The reported method allows suspected couriers to move without keeping a vehicle registered in their own name, while short rides and changing cars can make movements harder to recognise. It does not, by itself, establish whether drivers knowingly assisted them. No public statement located for this article attributed wrongdoing to a named operator, and the judicial status of every person questioned or detained in the latest cases was not clear from the accessible reporting.

The episode is not unprecedented. In September 2024, Politiezone Antwerpen said its West neighbourhood-support team stopped a taxi on Amerikalei after a passenger briefly entered a home. Officers found cash and black socks between two visibly nervous passengers, according to the police account. Three people, including the driver, were arrested; searches followed, and police reported seizing more than €6,000, 30 grams of cocaine and the taxi. Two adults went before an investigating judge and one minor before a youth judge. Those procedural decisions did not amount to convictions.

Other Antwerp files point to a flexible delivery market rather than one fixed model. Police have documented suspected sellers operating from bicycles, scooters, private cars and rental vehicles. In a separate case supplied as a starting point for this report, Het Nieuwsblad reported the seizure of drugs, an alarm pistol and more than €4,500 from a suspected dealer. The recurring pattern is mobility: small retail quantities can be brought directly to buyers while stocks, telephones and proceeds are distributed across people and locations.

Politiezone Antwerpen frames these interventions principally as targeted enforcement against drug dealing and neighbourhood nuisance. Its specialist drug-support and neighbourhood-support teams observe brief contacts, check suspected buyers and sellers, and use the resulting evidence to seek searches or judicial referrals. For people living near delivery points, the immediate concern is concrete: repeated traffic, intimidation, unsafe driving and the possibility that commercial premises or homes become operational bases.

The European Union Drugs Agency offers a broader and partly different frame. It describes Europe’s exceptionally available cocaine market as both a security problem and a source of growing health and social harm. Its 2025 European Drug Report says competition at wholesale and retail level can drive violence, while increasing cocaine and crack use raises costs for healthcare and marginalised communities. In other words, arrests may disrupt a delivery cell, but they do not by themselves reduce demand or guarantee treatment for users.

Antwerp’s local market also sits downstream from an international supply chain. Belgian customs, under Finance Minister Jan Jambon, reported that almost 55 tonnes of cocaine were seized at the Port of Antwerp-Bruges in 2025, a 24% increase from 2024. Customs called Belgium Europe’s leading maritime destination for cocaine shipments and stressed that the response cannot stop at national borders. The EUDA likewise identifies Antwerp, Rotterdam in the Netherlands and major Spanish ports as central entry points for cocaine trafficked from Latin America into Europe.

Those port figures should not be read as proof that the cocaine in the taxi cases entered through Antwerp’s docks; the publicly available case information does not trace its origin. They do explain why Belgium combines street-level policing with customs scanning, international investigations and EU cooperation. The next steps belong to investigators and prosecutors: determining who owned the drugs and cash, whether drivers acted knowingly, how the suspected delivery network was organised and whether the latest seizures connect to larger suppliers. Until courts rule, those implicated remain presumed innocent.