To outsiders, Tania Gomez was the glamorous 33-year-old owner of a dog rescue centre in Stockholm, who had moved to Lanzarote for a quieter life.
But to police, she was known as the “Cocaine Queen of Europe” and one of the Continent’s most wanted fugitives.
Now, after four years on the run, she has been captured, and is facing extradition back to her homeland on suspicion of drug trafficking and money laundering. If convicted, she faces a potential prison sentence of 14 years.
Charges were brought against Gomez in 2021, after a huge drugs bust led Swedish prosecutors to accuse her of smuggling consignments of cannabis into Sweden as well as handling large amounts of cocaine.
Credit: Lancelot Digital
In May 2020, she allegedly received 10 kilograms of cocaine in the Stockholm area, transported it to her home, where the drug was examined and tested, before being sold on.
Gomez, who was included in Europol’s 50 most-wanted fugitives in 2023 and described as being 1.60m tall (5ft 2in) with brown eyes, had developed a seemingly innocent cover for her alleged criminal activities as a smiley Instagram influencer with a special interest in rescued dogs.
Gomez ran the HundGärin dog rescue charity organisation in Stockholm until she went into hiding and fled the country, and the organisation still has photographs of her posing with bulldogs and pit bull terriers on its Facebook page.
Swedish prosecutors have said they suspect that her canine charity was itself a criminal operation that “linked businesses related to stray animals and probably to a network of illegal animal ownership and their transport abroad”.
Gomez kept a lower profile since moving to the Canary Islands, with her need to blend into the surroundings made easier by her fluency in the language. Her father is Spanish.
Spain’s national police force said that they received new information about Gomez´s whereabouts on February 7 and traced her to her home in Tías, a sleepy town of 21,000 inhabitants in the hills of southern Lanzarote.
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