BERLIN, Aug. 29 — The German and Polish police arrested 10 people Tuesday that they say were part of an organization that supplied anabolic steroids and human growth hormone to bodybuilders across Europe.
Reuters
A German bodybuilder after being arrested Tuesday in Gdansk, Poland.
The raid was the latest in a series of police actions against suspected doping suppliers, a practice the World Anti-Doping Agency encourages as a complement to its drug-testing policy.
The chairman of the agency, Dick Pound, said: “There are lots of things that the sports themselves can do, but they have no power to go and seize documents or compel evidence or anything like that, which is why governments have to be involved. The combination of the two is what is going to make this effective.”
Officials in Germany said there was no indication that the ring involved any sport other than bodybuilding.
“There were 10 suspects arrested and 52 buildings searched in Germany and Poland, mostly in Berlin and Hanover,” Uwe Schmidt, the senior criminal investigator, said at a news conference.
About 240 police officers were involved in the raid, which centered on fitness clubs and came after a three-year undercover investigation.
The alleged leader, a German bodybuilder known as Boris K, was arrested in northern Poland. In a statement, the German police said that Boris K had been running the Germany-based group via the Internet and telephone.
One of the first major police actions occurred in 1998, when French authorities arrested the physiotherapist Willy Voet of the Festina cycling team after discovering banned substances and syringes in his possession. That arrest set off a wave of subsequent raids.
More recently, authorities in the United States, Italy, Spain and China have taken action against suspected doping groups.
An investigation by the Internal Revenue Service led to the 2003 raid on the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative that resulted in the arrest of Victor Conte Jr. and three associates and spawned grand jury investigations into Barry Bonds and others. At the Turin Olympics this February, Italian law enforcement raided the residences of the Austrian biathlon and cross-country teams and discovered doping equipment.
In May, the police in Madrid raided what they described as a doping laboratory for cyclists and other athletes and seized steroids, hormones, the blood-boosting drug EPO, nearly 100 bags of frozen blood and equipment for treating blood. The raid resulted in the withdrawal of several favorites in the Tour de France, including Jan Ullrich of Germany and Ivan Basso of Italy.
And last week, the Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that authorities had caught teachers at an athletics school injecting teenagers with performance-boosting drugs and that testosterone and syringes had been found in the office of the school’s headmaster.
“Governments are actually hooking onto this pretty well,” Pound said.
