Through the curves of the Pyrenees to Perpignan: migrant smugglers fall
French police arrest fifteen people and shut down a network that made 600 trips in two years.
BarcelonaYears pass, but the tactics are repeated. Through the same winding roads where Catalan smugglers once smuggled tobacco, food, and even people, a criminal group of French smugglers smuggled vulnerable migrants recently arrived in Catalonia. They sought secondary, narrow, and untraveled roads, and the price per crossing ranged from 150 to 300 euros. A price that French authorities have admitted was low, and which they attribute to fierce competition between clans. The starting point was Catalonia. The destination, Northern Catalonia. Specifically, Perpignan, where they were offered alternative routes to reach, for example, Germany.
This Friday, the Marseille prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone, announced that French police had dismantled a smuggling ring that in two years—according to investigators' estimates—had made more than 600 trips, trafficking almost 2,000 people. They passed through the routes used for post-war smuggling, from the Empordà to the Pyrenees, but also through which kilograms and kilograms of drugs are now smuggled. "They had a certain similarity to drug trafficking. The merchandise is not bales of cannabis, but human beings in precarious situations," the prosecutor noted. The migrants were mostly Algerian nationals or from sub-Saharan Africa.
Bessone celebrated a rare milestone: they were able to dismantle the entire network. "This type of dismantling of such an organized network is quite rare, because here, we really dismantled the entire structure, with all the intermediaries," the prosecutor stated at a press conference. More than seventy police officers on both sides of the border arrested fifteen people, five of them in Spain, four in Perpignan, and six in Marseille.
Three cells and a split
The locations of the arrests exemplify the structure of the criminal group, which had a cell in Spain responsible for recruitment; another in Perpignan, with a hotelier playing a leading role; and a final one in Marseille formed by a family clan. Most of those arrested, as is common in these cases, were of the same nationality as the victims.
In fact, a split occurred within the Marseille cell, and several decided to open their own business. Instead of smuggling by land, people would be smuggled by sea from their countries of origin. The journey was from Algeria to Murcia and already had a much higher cost: around 9,000 euros per trip. However, the business did not end well because the Spanish police intercepted their boat before it could make the first trip.
