The transfer on the Gibraltar border set off alarms. Overnight, the movement of Chinese citizens trying to reach British territory from La Línea de la Concepción was so striking that it provoked a police operation. It turned out that these trips, detected in October last year, were as suspicious as they seemed and hid the maneuvers of a Chinese mafia that trafficked compatriots with a stopover in Gibraltar. The operation, called Fuyihas resulted in 14 people arrested between Cádiz and Madrid for attempting to fraudulently regularize more than 250 migrants who were held in storage for weeks.
The mafia kept the migrants crowded “in tiny spaces and under arduous unsanitary conditions,” as the National Police explained in a statement on Monday. The victims of Chinese nationality arrived at these hideouts, located in Madrid, after the mafia facilitated their illegal entry into Spain, both by air and by land. Once in the country, it was the leader of the organization who was in charge of transporting and accompanying the migrants to hotel establishments near La Línea.
In those days prior to the crossing to Gibraltar, the leader provided them with false documentation to be able to evade border controls and hid them in apartments. The objective was to organize a subsequent transit to the United Kingdom through the Gibraltar airport in a transfer process in which migrants were treated “like merchandise,” as the police point out in an investigation led by the General Commissioner for Immigration and Borders. The mafia used that modus operandi with more than 250 migrants.
But the organization had allegedly specialized in more crimes, such as document falsification and synthetic drug trafficking. Those involved, of Chinese nationality, were capable of falsifying passports, visas and stamps from Schengen countries and third countries. They were also capable of trafficking original documents that they delivered to migrants who resembled the real owners of those documents, in a method known as “look alike” (“similar”, in English). In addition, the mafia maintained contacts with document forgers in Türkiye. With all this framework, they were able to provide falsified documentation to migrants who entered Spain so that they could remain in the country, before their clandestine jump to the United Kingdom.
The detainees also diversified their illegal income with the sale and distribution of synthetic drugs, especially ketamine or MDMA. They were used for the consumption of migrants who entered our country illegally as well as for other clients. The police estimate that the mafia made profits of more than one million euros with all these alleged crimes of smuggling of migrants, false documents and drugs.
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The investigation has ended with 14 detainees, four arrested in Madrid and the rest in La Línea, an essential point for the transfers that the mafia made to Gibraltar. All are investigated for crimes of belonging to a criminal organization, favoring illegal immigration, crimes against public health and document falsification. In the only search that the police carried out in Madrid – in a house where the caches were located – the investigators seized falsified visas and passports of other nationalities, more than 400 grams of ketamine and MDMA, precision scales and cutting utensils, weight and distribution, plus a pad to counterfeit stamps from the Japanese Immigration Service.
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