After forcing their entry with explosives, the armed police were met with a chilling scene: a dentist’s chair equipped with leather restraints for the arms and legs. Nearby, there were handcuffs as well as pliers, scalpels, and hedge cutters.

This gang-related torture chamber, found within a soundproofed shipping container near the Dutch village of Wouwse Plantage, was shockingly gruesome.

However, beyond the horror, the police likely felt a sense of triumph. This discovery marked the early stages of one of the most significant international police operations ever undertaken.

This find would become one of the initial breakthroughs after a three-year investigation that managed to crack EncroChat, an encrypted messaging service favored by organized criminals, particularly those from Britain.

The network was infiltrated by French and Dutch police in March 2020, with the information then being distributed to law enforcement agencies across Europe, who quickly moved to collect evidence on crime syndicate leaders before users were alerted to the breach on June 13.

Many are continuing to face their days in court, with feared Manchester gang boss Jamie Rothwell, 38, jailed just last week.

Believing in EncroChat’s secure encryption, criminals openly discussed killings, retaliatory violence, and million-pound drug transactions, inadvertently furnishing law enforcement with valuable evidence for prosecutions.

Suggestions something dark was going on at the compound near Wouwse Plantage emerged in EncroChat exchanges referring to a ‘treatment room’, with one message stating: ‘We need cutting pliers for fingers and toes’.

There were further hints to torture, including, ‘We must have enough belts and tie-wraps to tie them’ and, ‘If I’ve got him on the chair, more will come. I wasn’t a fan of kids. S***, by Allah, kids are allowed too.’ 

Another text referred to the torture chamber’s sound insulation, with the user writing: ‘It’s triple isolated. Even if you’re standing next to it, you’ll hear nothing.’  

Other worrying interceptions spoke of the ‘ebi,’ a reference to a high security Dutch prison.

Gang members even exchanged photos of the torture room and dentist’s chair with belts attached to the arm and foot supports.

After putting the compound under surveillance, police spotted several men working to kit out the prison cells.

When police eventually raided the site on June 22, 2020, six other containers were set up to hold prisoners, all lined with foil in an effort to deter the victims from being spotted on thermal imaging cameras.

Mercifully, neither the torture chamber nor the makeshift prison were ever used, and 11 men were sentenced in 2022 to jail terms of between one and nine years.

The ringleader, named by Dutch media as Roger P, 50, had previously been jailed for 15 years for cocaine trafficking and received an additional 33-month sentence.

He is one of hundreds of kingpins who have been brought to justice using EncroChat evidence.

Crucially, malware installed by telecoms experts allowed messages to be recovered in real time, allowing last-minute interventions that undoubtedly saved lives. 

While users hid under anonymous handles, many implicated themselves by sharing personal details, and even selfies. 

Manchester gang boss Jamie Rothwell was identified as the user ‘Live Long’ after sharing a photo of himself with two fingers raised to the camera.

A leading member of Manchester’s Anti A-Team gang, Rothwell fled abroad after a gunman sprayed bullets at him at a car wash in 2015 as part of a murderous gang feud with their rivals, the A Team.

But he continued directing drug and gun smuggling operations into the UK from his bolthole in Barcelona.

When shown a picture of an AK-47 rifle with magazines and ammunition, Rothwell retorted: ‘Makes me hard that bro’.

He also bragged of moving 300 guns, having rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and an anti-tank gun, writing: ‘I sell a lot of Glocks’.

In other messages, Rothwell described his hatred for a gang rival, Leon Cullen.

He wrote: ‘I’ve give Leon a way out….he a grass…he turned on me for nothing

‘Tried kill me….while my daughter there…he my only enemy….when he lands in UK that’s when it starts.’

And revelling in his life of crime, he told a friend: ‘When you have fire in your heart you don’t stop. You get addicted. You lose everyone. You turn cold, no emotions.’

Rothwell was arrested by Spanish police in 2020, with video footage showing him dancing a bizarre jig after being led away.

He was jailed for 43 years at Manchester Crown Court last week. He had earlier pleaded guilty to a raft of firearms and drugs charges, alongside conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm with intent.

Nine associates were jailed for a combined 163 years and 11 months.

Another kingpin hauled back to Britain using EncroChat evidence was James Harding, who ran a vast £100million cocaine empire alongside his ‘loyal right-hand man’, Jayes Kharouti, 39.

The 34-year-old, who claimed to be a high-end watch sales executive, was living in luxury at the The Nest apartment complex in Al Barari, Dubai, staying in five-star hotels and driving Bugatti and Lamborghini sports cars.

But messages showed him trying to recruit a hitman to put an unnamed rival courier ‘permanently out of business’, arming him with a gun and ammunition for the ‘full M’, meaning murder.

The pair were also shown to be behind a vast cocaine smuggling operation that brought a metric tonne of cocaine into the UK and generated £5m in profit in just 10 weeks.

Like Rothwell, Harding openly identified himself in a series of preening selfies he sent on the same phone he used to arrange his hit.

He even used his EncroChat handle to book a table for his family at the Nusr et Steakhouse in Dubai – the creation of Internet personality Nusret Gökçe, better known as ‘Salt Bae’.

Harding was arrested in Switzerland before being brought by private jet to London, where he was met by armed officers. His Old Bailey trial was also held under tight security before he was jailed for life with a minimum term of 32 years in June.

Operation Venetic – the name for the UK’s response to the EncroChat hack led by the National Crime Agency (NCA) – exposed the shocking violence drug bosses used to protect their turf.

Few were more sadistic than Liverpool’s hated Huyton Firm, led by lifelong gangster Vincent Coggins – supported by his savage enforcer, Paul Woodford.

EncroChat messages showed Coggins and Woodford discussing their plans to murder the men they believed responsible for a 2020 raid on a house they were using to hide drugs.

Coggins messaged Woodford to say he was planning to use a ‘pineapple’ (hand grenade) on the men, to which he replied: ‘I kill him with u m8’.

In another exchange, Woodford asked Coggins if he should buy a ‘belter’, meaning a gun. Coggins replied with: ‘M8 just bought load more, we cool for tools’.

Coggins went on to be jailed for 28 years for drug trafficking and blackmail, while Woodford received 24 years and six months. Vincent’s brother, Francis, was arrested by police in the Netherlands earlier this year after a five-year manhunt.

The ability of police to lift the lid on a previously hidden world allowed them to gather evidence to prosecute kingpins previously considered ‘untouchable’.

These included Jamie ‘the Iceman’ Stevenson, who spent decades as one of the UK’s most notorious gangsters and was once accused of murdering fellow gangster Tony McGovern, the best man at his wedding.

Stevenson originally rose up through the Glasgow underworld in the 1990s and became close friends with McGovern, whose family ran the so-called McGovernment mob in the north of the city.

However, the pair would later fall out amid a vicious power struggle and Stevenson narrowly survived a botched attempt on his life. In 2000, McGovern himself died in an assassination that many blamed on his former friend – although the charges against him were dropped.

The moment that would lead to Stevenson’s final downfall came on Valentine’s Day 2020, when the gangster was unwittingly caught in a police surveillance operation in Spain.

Officers had been watching the bar of Alicante’s four-star Melia Hotel after the arrival of David Bilsland, a Glaswegian fruit seller accused of smuggling drugs.

Spanish officers tipped off by their British counterparts sent surveillance images of the meeting back to Scotland.

But when photographs from the Alicante bar arrived in Scotland, investigators were stunned to see the man Bisland had been meeting was Stevenson, then one of the UK’s most wanted criminals.

In a T-shirt and jeans the gangster, once the key suspect in a murder case involving his own best man, was confident he passed off as just another British tourist – and completely unaware he was under surveillance.

The summit was the beginning of the end for Stevenson.

Until then detectives had had no idea where he was after he fled the country on police bail.

They later used EncroChat messages to link Stevenson to a plot to use Bisland’s Glasgow fruit business to smuggle £100m worth of cocaine into Glasgow inside boxes of bananas.

Deputy Crown agent Kenny Donnelly, from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, said the messages made it clear Stevenson had ‘directed the group’ and he is now serving a 20 year sentence.