More than 230 gangs are now running Northern Ireland's billion-pound organised crime industry, a new report claimed today.
Despite 60 gangs being broken up or disrupted in the past year, dangerous new groups with global links have moved in, according to the British government's Organised Crime Task Force (OCTF).
Loyalist and republican terrorists are heavily involved in sophisticated illegal operations stretching from North America to the Far East, involving massive levels of drug smuggling, counterfeiting, and extortion, the task force's latest report found.
The authorities identified 150 local gangs whose rackets are confined to the North. But another 85 units turning over huge profits have established international links and recruited specialists to protect their illegitimate businesses.
The numbers represent a huge increase from previous years, but experts insisted this was down to advancements in collecting and analysing intelligence.
The dossier includes evidence of counterfeiting links with Turkey and Thailand as part of a trade worth £152 million sterling annually. A cannabis route stretching to South Africa was also discovered, along with illegal cigarettes coming in from China, and fake currency flooding in from all over Europe.
Links with Chinese criminals involved in a people smuggling enterprise were detected as well.
The IRA is blamed for being heavily connected to a five million-litre a year fuel laundering enterprise that helps fund the terror group. The Provisionals have also run large tobacco, alcohol and VAT fraud scams in an assessment that backed the Independent Monitoring Commission's scathing appraisal of republican crime.
Loyalists were also operating sophisticated scams, the report stressed, with 70 per cent of extortions last year - sometimes involving hundreds of thousands of pounds - attributed to them.
The UDA, Northern Ireland's biggest loyalist organisation, has also been dealing in drugs, armed robberies and prostitution.
PA