If the objective is to knock out cell towers, just jam them. It's clearly a SIM farm for middle-man communications. It just happened to be close to where the UN were.
They found 50g of cocaine, which is more than a personal (not Scarface) use amount of cocaine, but more on the scale of a single dealer. Like the guy running the sim farm was also selling coke on the side.
Also hard to imagine how this could be used for espionage. Listening in on cell traffic requires defeating security measures in the protocol. Generally something like a 0 day. This might require a single SIM card, but probably not lots of unless there’s something very unusual about the vulnerability that requires lots of valid seeming actors on the network. Plausible I suppose. But “SMS spam” is a vastly more likely explanation than a security hole that can’t be brute forced on the radio.
