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On the run, the lingerie model who heads an all-women cocaine-smuggling cartel

24 February 2010 22:51 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. A lingerie model is believed to be the mastermind behind an all-women drug gang that smuggles cocaine into Britain, APA reports quoting dailymail.co.uk web-page.
An international arrest warrant has been issued for Angie Sanselmente Valencia, 30, who is said to only hire glamour models to transport the drugs from South America to Europe.
It’s believed that Colombian-born Valencia had been seeing a Mexican drug lord known as ’The Monster’ but split with him at the end of last year to form her own cocaine-smuggling gang.
She is said to describe the women working for her as ’unsuspicious, beautiful angels’. The women are told to be ’nice, but not flashy’.
Valencia, who was crowned Colombia’s ’Queen Of Coffee’ in 2000, left modelling and moved to Argentina late last year to establish her network.
Her ’angels’ were paid Â£3,200 for each trip they made and one of her gang is believed to have boarded a flight every 24 hours with the packages of cocaine.
From Argentina they would fly up to the Mexican Caribbean resort of Cancun and from there they would smuggle them into Europe.
However her network began to unravel several weeks ago when one of her ’drug mules’ was caught at Argentina’s Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires carrying 55kg of cocaine.
The 21-year-old woman began to talk and within 12 hours police investigators had arrested a further three people.
The drug mule had made no attempt to hide the cocaine in her suitcase because she’d been told no one would stop her at the airport, according to Argentine newspaper La Nacion.
Police are now investigating the gang’s links to people working at the airport.
Following the arrests Valencia promptly disappeared from a four-star hotel in Buenos Aires but is still believed to be in the South American country.
She’d arrived from Mexico last December with her beloved pet Pomeranian dog. Investigators tried to trace her through the address to which the animal was registered but it only led them to an abandoned warehouse.