Two people have been arrested and 14,820 euros, eight telephone terminals and electronic access cards have been intervened
The National Police have dismantled an organization dedicated to the trafficking of Dominican migrants through the Adolfo Suárez-Madrid Barajas airport, the Madrid Police Headquarters has reported in a statement. Each migrant paid 8,000 euros, so the benefit obtained by the network would amount to more than 240,000 euros.
The international organization provided migrants with airline tickets to travel from the Dominican Republic to African countries with a stopover in Madrid, where an airport worker helped them circumvent the police entrance controls.
Two people have been arrested and two house searches have been carried out, one in the city of Madrid and the other in Paracuellos del Jarama, in which 14,820 euros have been intervened, eight telephone terminals, electronic access cards and reflective vests.
The police investigation carried out, in collaboration with the Dominican authorities through the Spanish Attaché of the Interior in that country, alerted to the existence of a sophisticated international criminal organization dedicated to the promotion of illegal immigration that had two branches, one settled in the Dominican Republic and the other in Spain.
The Dominican faction originally captured the migrants and provided them with the plane tickets, hotel reservations and medical insurance necessary to travel to an African country for which they did not need a visa, which necessarily implied a stopover in Madrid. Once in the international transit zone of the Madrid airport, the migrants were picked up by a member of the Spanish branch who worked in the interior of Barajas.
THEY PRETENDED TO BE WORKERS
Before starting the journey, the migrants received precise instructions on how they should behave upon arrival in Madrid and on how their clothing should be. Key to his purposes was that it be the same type and color as the slaughterhouse clothes of the company for which the member of the receiving organization worked.
Thus, when they were picked up in the international transit zone, that individual provided them with reflective vests with the logo and name of their company, which allowed them to go unnoticed by believing that they were airport workers.
The same subject, as an airport employee, had access cards for restricted areas, an element that he took advantage of to introduce migrants from the transit areas to the airport terminals, thereby avoiding police entry controls into Spain.
The agents have been able to verify that since December 2019 at least 30 people of Dominican origin have irregularly accessed Spain through this procedure, although it is estimated that this number could amount to several hundred.
Each migrant paid 8000 euros to the criminal network: 2,000 euros for plane tickets, 2,000 euros for the member who received them at Madrid airport and 4,000 for the Dominican faction.