2024-03-18 23:19:00
The Spanish Civil Guard announced that it had arrested a gang made up of at least 14 people involved in blackmailing the bodies of migrants. Operating in several cities in Spain, the gang also included state employees and civil servants.
Spanish police have dismantled a network of scammers who used the deaths of poor migrants at sea to blackmail their families in exchange for information and then repatriate the bodies, reports the Instituto Armado.
The detainees are accused of crimes of revealing secrets, violation of respect for the deceased, fraud, membership in a criminal organization, falsification of documents, corruption and omission of the obligation to prosecute crimes.
Arrested in particular in Murcia, Almería and Jaén, those involved are suspected of having concluded “irregular contracts” for the repatriation of the bodies of migrants with the complicity of administrative agents as well as morgue employees to provide them with information precise on the bodies of the victims.
The criminal network, one of whose leaders is said to have Moroccan origins, has operated without problems for years using social networks such as Facebook. They used the distress of families who had not heard from their loved ones who had gone to sea to extract money from them in exchange for information on their whereregardings, then to send them photos of the bodies, then for the repatriation of the bodies.
The gang’s criminals used hundreds of fake profiles on social networks to contact the victims’ families following having access to their identities through their accomplices operating in the Spanish administrations.
According to information, members of this gang contact families once more to ask them for personal information on missing people and carry out false searches and accompany relatives to file complaints, manage DNA collections for the supposed identification of bodies, as well as translation services.
They told the families that this was the only way to proceed in Spain for the identification and repatriation of the bodies. Acting with the complicity of employees of certain public institutions linked to the identification process such as the institute of forensic medicine, or even funeral directors, they provided photos of the corpses to the families to prove to them that they were indeed of the person drowned at sea.
Civil Guard agents discovered the first elements of this organization when they detected on the Internet several of these photographs of corpses of migrants from Morocco or Algeria.
They also discovered that the mastermind of this group would have used his contacts in communities of North African origin to get families to take his word for it. A total of 13 searches were carried out in several towns and numerous documents linked to the case, several vehicles and nearly 70,000 euros in cash from the home of one of those responsible, were seized.
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