They lived and worked in Madrid and Valencia, but when the major festivities in Seville came around, such as Holy Week or the April Fair, they would travel to the Andalusian capital to carry out “criminal campaigns”, as described by the National Police. In all cases, their field of action was the streets or public transport in central areas of the cities, where there are large crowds of people and they could steal the wallets of their victims, mainly foreign tourists, without them noticing. National Police officers have arrested eight men and nine women aged between 50 and 18 years old, as alleged members of a family clan of pickpockets of Bosnian origin characterised by their itinerary, according to information provided on Wednesday by the Ministry of the Interior.
Police files have revealed that some of those arrested had been operating in Spain for over a decade and that, in some cases, they had accumulated nearly 200 arrests for similar crimes. Investigated for nearly two years to uncover the complex structure of the group, the police had to rush the arrests on July 16 when they became aware that a large part of the clan was planning to travel to Paris to take advantage of the concentrations of people on the occasion of the Olympic Games to commit crimes, according to sources close to the investigation. Three of them have been remanded in custody accused of the crimes of belonging to a criminal organization, theft, fraud, money laundering, falsification of documents, usurpation of real estate and human trafficking.
Operation Tavan – so named because most of the clan came from an area with this name in Bosnia Herzegovina – was launched in 2022 after an exchange of information between the police forces of France and Spain detected that members of the organisation based in France were connected to individuals of the same nationality who had been operating in Spain for years and who, in fact, had accumulated numerous arrests for theft. The Spanish agents then set themselves the objective of the investigations, coordinated by the Prosecutor’s Office against Organised Crime and the Central Court of Instruction number 6 of the National Court, not so much to act against the ultimate perpetrators of the robberies (some of them have not been caught in this operation because they cannot be located or have left Spain), but to uncover the true structure of the plot and, above all, to reach its ringleaders, police sources say.
The investigation, which also involved the European Union Agency for Police Cooperation (Europol), revealed that, as is usual in this type of criminal gang, the activity was directed and controlled by the older men, while the women carried out the thefts, following their instructions. In most cases, the robberies were committed without the victims noticing – “they were real specialists” – but when they were discovered, they did not hesitate to threaten them and even assault them to carry out the crime. The investigations also revealed that some of the women were brought illegally to Spain and that, once here, they were forced to steal by the ringleaders after being subdued by threats and assaults.
Once the robbery was completed, the loot was managed by the men in the group. The cash, the main target of the thefts, was partly sent by remittances to other members of the clan settled in France, Italy and Bosnia. In the case of foreign currency, the group exchanged it for euros in exchange offices. On other occasions, the funds obtained were laundered through the so-called smurfingin which a large number of members of the group made bank transfers of small amounts so as not to raise suspicions to accounts controlled by the heads of the organization.
The group also attempted to make a profit from the credit cards found in the stolen wallets by withdrawing money from ATMs or making purchases using them. Pawnshop receipts for allegedly stolen jewellery were also found. During the six searches carried out, the police found around 10,000 euros, 7,000 dollars (6,400 euros) and banknotes in other currencies such as Colombian pesos, Swedish crowns and Indian rupees. Thirteen bank deposits allegedly used by the group to launder money were also blocked.
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Police sources say that in all the years that the group had been operating in Spain, it could have earned “hundreds of thousands of euros”. Despite this, the lifestyle of its members was “relatively humble”, except for the use they made of two high-end vehicles, which have been seized. In fact, the intermediate levels of the organisation and the women in charge of carrying out the thefts stayed in squatted houses which they changed frequently, both to facilitate mobility and the change of city where they operated, and to make it difficult for the police to locate them. In addition, they carried false documentation.
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