Spanish police broke up Moroccan immigration mafia

As the newspaper wrote on Saturday, during the action, police used drones to track suspects.

The police operation, which began in the middle of last week, was directed against organizations dealing with the movement of illegal immigrants from Morocco by sea to the Canary Islands. In the archipelago, immigrants were located in rural homes or in illegally occupied dwellings, where they stayed until they were given false documentation to continue their journey to the Iberian Peninsula and from there to other EU countries.

The way the mafia operated was, among other things, that illegal immigrants reported the alleged loss of documents, e.g. the theft of a passport, and with the legal certificate received and after the purchase of tickets they could board an aircraft or a ship to continental Spain.

The mafia had cells in the Canary Islands, Cadiz, Malaga, Granada and Murcia. People who did not pay the previously fixed amount were kidnapped," wrote the journal. Currently, police are trying to calculate mob profits from organizing illegal immigration.

According to Europa Press, nearly 20,000 illegal immigrants arrived in the Spanish archipelago from January to November, including more than half from Morocco. Currently, only 9,000 immigrants remain on the islands and the others are likely to be on the Iberian Peninsula or other European countries.

The conservative "La Razon" wrote about illegal immigration not only in the context of immigration mafias, but also jihadism.

Police agents working in the field consulted by this journal expressed concern about the phenomenon of "a highly organised and financially-enabled illegal immigration from the Maghreb countries, especially Morocco". "(These immigrants) have nothing to do with the poor people of sub-Saharan Africa," said police officers quoted by this newspaper.

Source: PAP